Alan Dershowitz: Trump's second impeachment
The Interview
BBC
4.3 • 537 Ratings
🗓️ 15 January 2021
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Donald Trump has secured a unique place in the history books as the first president in American history to be impeached twice. What that means in practical terms isn't clear. There’ll be no Trump trial in the Senate before Joe Biden moves into the White House, but Democrats insist he will be held to account for the assault on the Capitol. Stephen Sackur speaks to the veteran lawyer Alan Dershowitz, part of the defence team in the first impeachment. Will he get involved in the sequel, and how will it play in a divided America?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Sacker. My guest today is one of America's best-known and controversial defense attorneys, Alan Dershowitz. Now in his 80s, he forged an early reputation as a precocious legal scholar with a focus on freedom of expression and civil liberties issues, before proving himself a charismatic |
| 0:23.5 | courtroom performer with a predilection for defending high-profile clients. Over the years, |
| 0:30.0 | he's defended some notorious names, Klaus von Boulog, O.J. Simpson and Jeffrey Epstein to name |
| 0:37.3 | but three. And more recently, he added |
| 0:39.8 | Donald J. Trump to the list. Mr. Dershowitz was part of the Trump legal team in the first |
| 0:45.5 | impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate. Now, the outgoing president has, uniquely in American |
| 0:51.5 | political history, been impeached again, this time on a charge of |
| 0:56.2 | inciting the violence which engulfed the US Capitol on January the 6th and posed a very real threat |
| 1:03.4 | to America's democratic institutions. These are, of course, unprecedented times. Joe Biden will |
| 1:10.3 | be inaugurated on January the 20th, and there'll be |
| 1:12.8 | no Trump trial before he leaves office. But Democrats insist the outgoing president must still be |
| 1:19.9 | held to account. Is that the right thing to do? And what will a second Trump impeachment trial |
| 1:26.0 | mean for America? Well, Alan Dershowitz joins me now from Massachusetts. |
| 1:31.7 | Welcome to Hard Talk. Well, thank you so much. Yesterday, we saw several records broken. One record, |
| 1:37.8 | the obvious one, that the president was impeached for the second time. But the more important record |
| 1:42.4 | is that Congress violated more provisions |
| 1:45.5 | of the Constitution in one day than any Congress in the history of the United States ever did. |
| 1:52.2 | They violated the First Amendment freedom of speech. |
| 1:54.7 | They violated the criteria for impeachment. |
| 1:57.1 | They violated due process by not giving the President an opportunity to be heard. |
| 2:01.1 | They violated the 25th Amendment by sending a message to the vice president to violate the Constitution. |
| 2:07.1 | And they violated the Bill of Attainter Clause by saying that a president can be put on trial after he leaves office in violation of the Constitution. |
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