The View’s Meghan McCain on Thursday warned her co-hosts not to dismiss Trump impeachment legal team member Alan Dershowitz so much—following the widespread mockery he’s received over his recent arguments— insisting his reputation is nothing to laugh at since he once “helped a serial killer get off.”
During the impeachment trial’s Q&A session on Wednesday, Dershowitz essentially argued a president could engage in corrupt acts—like, say, a quid pro quo with Ukraine—if he believes it “will help him get elected in the public interest.”
“Every public official that I know believes that his election is in the public interest, and mostly you’re right,” Dershowitz argued. “Your election is in the public interest, and if a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment.”
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On Thursday’s edition of The View, the majority of the table roundly dismissed the famed attorney’s argument, mockingly wondering if Dershowitz was asserting that Trump could “nuke the Ukraine to make Putin happy” if the president could claim it was in the “public interest.”
Co-host Sunny Hostin, a lawyer herself, took issue with Dershowitz’s “disingenuous argument” excusing corruption.
“So the way I think about it is, let’s say you kill someone, let’s say you murder someone and that someone happens to also be a really bad person, so you’re like, you know, helping the world in a sense because you’ve taken this bad person out of the world,” Hostin stated. “But you still killed someone, so you’re still guilty of a crime, right?”
After Hostin added that he made an argument “any first-year law student would shoot down” and the other hosts wondered aloud what happened to Dershowitz over the years, McCain jumped in to offer a defense of the famed attorney.
“I’m not a lawyer, I don’t know,” the conservative host said. “I will say that Alan Dershowitz helped a serial killer get off, O.J. Simpson, so he must be a pretty good lawyer because he did a really good job with that.”
“I think O.J. Simpson is guilty so he must be a pretty good lawyer so we’re laughing at him all the time and I don’t think, like. that’s a person to be laughed at,” McCain concluded.
While Simpson was eventually acquitted of murdering his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman, he has never been accused of being a “serial killer.”
McCain’s interesting defense of Dershowitz comes a day after the retired Harvard Law professor appeared on The View for a rambling, off-the-rails interview that featured the hosts and audience loudly groaning at his positions.
