Fresh off his latest stint arguing against impeachment on the floor of the Senate, Alan Dershowitz appeared on The View via satellite from Washington, D.C., on Wednesday morning and the interview was just as insane as you may have imagined.
From the start, the hosts had an unusually hard time keeping Dershowitz on track as he filibustered about the framers’ intentions and his newfound theory that the president must commit a crime to be removed from office. Asked to name one other constitutional scholar who believes that, Dershowitz began talking about, “In 1867 the dean of the Columbia Law School…”
“Wait, wait, wait,” moderator Whoopi Goldberg interrupted. “In 1492, Columbus sailed the seas of blue, but listen, I need us to move on.” When he refused to move on, she told him, “Here’s the thing, Alan, you’re not going to get any time because you’ve got four people trying to ask questions. So I’m asking you to move faster.”
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He continued to press his point, arguing that scholars are only taking that position because Donald Trump is being impeached. “If Hillary Clinton were being impeached, they'd all be on my side,” he said, to which Joy Behar yelled, “That’s just baloney!”
“So I'm moving you on or I'm cutting you off, one or the other is going to happen,” Goldberg added to cheers from the audience “I don't want to make this contentious, but we only have several minutes.” When Dershowitz chortled in response, she said, “You're laughing. I've always been respectful to you and you've always been respectful to me. So I need to move us on.”
With that, she played a clip of Dershowitz making the exact opposite argument about the necessity of a crime during the Clinton impeachment. All he could really do was make a joke about his appearance in 1998—“First of all, I want to admit one thing, I was dead wrong about my haircut”—and say that he’s “changed his mind” about a lot of things over the years.
But as Sunny Hostin then pointed out, even if you did need a “crime” to convict Trump, the Government Accountability Office already determined that Trump’s decision to withhold aid to Ukraine was illegal.
“They didn't say that, no, no, no,” Dershowitz said. “Sunny, I'll tell you what, let's bet $1,000 to be contributed to the peace of Israel and Palestine.” As she maintained her position, he contradicted the GAO by saying, “They have no jurisdiction to conclude it's a crime. Moreover, the GAO is dead wrong. The president conducts foreign policy. He has the right to withhold funds.”
By the time Dershowitz started quoting Abraham Lincoln, Goldberg could be heard groaning, “Oh god!” And all of that was before Meghan McCain got her chance to ask a question.
