New Article: Trump’s Impeachment Legal “Dream Team”: It’s Alan Dershowitz Time, All PILPUL, All DA’AS TORAH, All Hypocrisy!
David Shasha
Trump’s Impeachment Legal “Dream Team”: It’s Alan Dershowitz Time, All PILPUL, All DA’AS TORAH, All Hypocrisy!
I just checked the newsletter master table of contents and discovered that the first time Alan Dershowitz made it in was SHU 71, way back in October 2003.
His name appeared 76 times in the course of the search.
That does not include his many appearances in the WION and TWIT, which I do not formally track.
And we have also had the occasional “This Week in Alan Dershowitz” installment:
Dershowitz, sadly, is one of the most important Ashkenazim of our time, and I have paid due attention to his many crooked shenanigans, firmly rooted in the venerable tradition of PILPUL and DA’AS TORAH.
We have noted how he has been a close ally and legal advisor of the criminal president:
He has published – and re-published under different titles – a book attacking any Trump Impeachment:
That is the fixed point that anchors anything he says on the matter.
He has proudly stated that Trump is more powerful than a King:
https://www.newsweek.com/alan-dershowitz-trump-king-don-mcgahn-fox-news-1474130
Concerning the legal requirement for Trumpstooge hack lawyer Don McGahn to honor a subpoena and testify before Congress, he made the following brilliant “legal” statement:
[Judge Brown] went nuts, talking about how the president's not the king. Of course the president's not the king; the president's far more powerful than the king. The president has the power that kings have never had.
Clearly, Dershowitz does not believe in American Democracy.
In a 2018 book event at Barnes and Noble in New York’s Union Square, he got his clock cleaned by journalist Josh Barro:
It was wonderful to see Dershowitz getting beaten down by a reporter who was not in any way intimidated by his Harvard DA’AS TORAH Ashkenazi pedigree.
We must now also give credit to MSNBC host Ari Melber who managed to get Dershowitz to spill the beans and give away the game on what he plans to do in the Senate Impeachment trial:
It is a very important interview which is about as perfect an example of PILPUL DA’AS TORAH malfeasance as you will ever get.
Dershowitz’s PILPUL crookedness breaks down into three elements:
1. “I Am Not Part of the Trump Legal Team”
Amazingly, Dershowitz insisted that he is not actually a part of the Trump legal team:
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/01/17/dershowitz-clarifies-role-on-trump-impeachment-team-100740
Melber naturally retorted that Dershowitz was announced by the White House as a member of the team:
Indeed, many commentators were surprised to see Ken Starr, of Clinton Impeachment infamy, and Dershowitz put on the team, as both men are knee-deep in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal:
Famously, the scumbag Epstein, friend of Trump and client of Starr and Dershowitz, cut a deal with the Florida prosecutors that gave him a light sentence, allowing him to leave the local prison to work in his nearby office:
The Florida prosecutor in the case was Alex Acosta, who was rewarded by Trump with an appointment as Labor Secretary, though he would resign amidst the fallout from Epstein:
Starr and Dershowitz have no such problem.
In his tenure as president of Baylor University, Starr became embroiled in the sexual abuse scandal that rocked the school:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baylor_University_sexual_assault_scandal#Aftermath
For Starr, it appears, sexual misconduct is a relative thing, depending on who does it and what it means to his career.
It is noteworthy that Starr’s successor, the odious Robert Ray, was also put on the Trump Impeachment trial team:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/17/us/politics/robert-ray-trump-legal-team.html
In 2006 Ray was arrested for harassing his girlfriend:
It is certain that, as the Senate trial proceeds, the news networks will be showing split-screen video of Starr and Ray which will expose their Impeachment hypocrisy.
As we so clearly saw in the Clinton Impeachment, the two prosecutors held to a very restricted standard of presidential power and a very expansive view of what criminal Obstruction means:
https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/impeachment/clinton-impeachment-and-its-fallout
Their view of things has changed dramatically in the case of their new client:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/17/us/politics/robert-ray-trump-legal-team.html
It should be recalled that Starr began with Whitewater, a failed land deal in Arkansas, and expanded what can properly be called a demented Witch-Hunt with the Monica Lewinsky affair:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitewater_controversy
These are Trump’s lawyers!
What a truly motley set of characters:
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2020/01/17/trumps-legal-team-is-a-wretched-hive-of-scum-and-villainy/
Perhaps the great New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd put it best in her excellent article “Starr Chamber: The Sequel”:
In her trenchant words:
Trump is once more doing his part to energize women voters. On Friday, we learned that the president will get help from Starr and Dershowitz for the impeachment trial in the Senate.
The Starr chamber was a shameful period of American history, with the prissy Puritan independent counsel hounding and virtually jailing Monica Lewinsky and producing hundreds of pages of panting, bodice-ripping prose that read more like bad erotica than a federal report, rife with lurid passages about breasts, stains and genitalia. Like the Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale and other Pharisaic Holy Rollers before him, the prosecutor who read the Bible and sang hymns when he jogged became fixated on sex in an unhealthy, warped way.
Even Trump was appalled. “Starr’s a freak,” the bloviating builder told me back in 1999. “I bet he’s got something in his closet.” In other interviews, he called Starr “a lunatic,” “a disaster” and “off his rocker,” and expressed sympathy for Hillary having to stand by her man when he was “being lambasted by this crazy Ken Starr, who is a total wacko.”
Starr, who once clutched his pearls over Bill Clinton’s sexual high jinks, is now going to bat for President “Access Hollywood.” After playing an avenging Javert about foreplay in the Oval, Starr will now do his utmost to prove that a real abuse of power undermining Congress and American foreign policy is piffle.
In 2007, he defended Jeffrey Epstein. By 2016, Starr was being ousted as president of Baptist Baylor University for failing to protect women and looking the other way when football players were accused and sometimes convicted of sexual assaults. In other words, he’s a complete partisan hack who doesn’t give a damn about sexual assault.
And then there’s Dershowitz, whose past clients have included such sterling fellows as Epstein, Claus von Bülow, O.J. Simpson and Harvey Weinstein. How did he miss Ted Bundy? Still, Dershowitz has put himself on the side of an impressive pantheon of villainy in the realm of violence against girls and women.
Virginia Giuffre, Prince Andrew’s accuser, has also claimed that she was offered as a teenager to Dershowitz for sex — a contention that Dershowitz has denied in a countersuit.
Dershowitz, like Starr and Ray, will be appearing on the Senate floor to argue on behalf of the defendant, which means that he has been personally hired by Trump, and is not some disinterested observer presenting his “objective” Constitutional views for the public’s benefit.
2. “I Voted for Hillary!”
Dershowitz also continues to insist that he is a Liberal Democrat who did not vote for Trump.
He is only aiding Trump because of his very strict constitutional principles:
None of this will wash anymore, because Dershowitz is now a card-carrying member of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, as we saw when he enthusiastically appeared at the annual convention of The Steamboat Institute last year:
When we look at the rapturous response of the audience members, it leaves no question about where Dershowitz stands these days.
The Vast Right Wing Conspiracy is a very tough crowd that does not take to cheering on its Liberal enemies!
Indeed, Dershowitz has become a permanent fixture on FOX News:
https://www.foxnews.com/person/d/alan-dershowitz
The only Liberals on FOX News are the ones they use for punching bags:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FoxNewsLiberal
Dershowitz can claim to be anything he wants to be, but what is actually important is what he does in the real world and how it impacts the rest of us.
In the Age of Trump Fascism to stand with the White House is to stand with evil. And no amount of PILPUL Gaslighting can change that.
3. “Trump Does Not Deserve to Be Impeached”
As we have seen, Dershowitz, duplicitously citing the Constitution, continues to claim that Trump’s powers exceed that of a King:
https://www.newsweek.com/alan-dershowitz-trump-king-don-mcgahn-fox-news-1474130
This means that, as Trump has also wrongly stated, his Article Two powers are absolute:
According to Dershowitz’s view of the Constitution, Trump is essentially Above the Law. He can basically do whatever he wants with impunity.
In the interview Melber properly cited Federalist #65 which makes the Constitutional case for Impeachment pretty clear:
https://www.congress.gov/resources/display/content/The+Federalist+Papers#TheFederalistPapers-65
Here is the crucial part of the text, which proves definitively that the Founders envisioned Impeachment for just someone like Trump:
A well-constituted court for the trial of impeachments is an object not more to be desired than difficult to be obtained in a government wholly elective. The subjects of its jurisdiction are those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated POLITICAL, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself. The prosecution of them, for this reason, will seldom fail to agitate the passions of the whole community, and to divide it into parties more or less friendly or inimical to the accused. In many cases it will connect itself with the pre-existing factions, and will enlist all their animosities, partialities, influence, and interest on one side or on the other; and in such cases there will always be the greatest danger that the decision will be regulated more by the comparative strength of parties, than by the real demonstrations of innocence or guilt.
The text is a clear indictment of everything Trump has done since he was elected.
Evidence of Trump’s corruption and criminality, including treason and bribery, are reflected in the Impeachment articles. The two articles present Abuse of Power for his actions with Ukraine aimed to gain personal advantage by abusing his office, and Obstruction of Congress for his formal stonewalling of the Impeachment Investigation as he ordered the complete withholding of all evidence and witnesses:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/10/us/politics/articles-impeachment-document-pdf.html
In spite of this criminal Obstruction, the charges of corruption and malfeasance have been confirmed by numerous administration witnesses, what Trump calls the “Deep State,” but have also been driven home with great force by indicted Giuliani associate Lev Parnas, who has presented to Congress a huge trove of evidence, including text messages, pictures, audio, and letters, that detail exactly how the president was directly tied to the Ukraine shakedown scheme and masterminded its execution.
The oily Giuliani business partner Parnas presented this information in an extended interview with MSNBC host Rachel Maddow:
Indeed, the ROOSKIE grifter showed us what a cesspool Trumpworld in his review of the Ukraine extortion plot; all designed to get dirt on Joe Biden in time to affect the 2020 campaign – just as Trump and his criminal cabal did to Hillary Clinton in 2016.
The Maddow interview provided a good deal of specific insight into how Trump personally works with that criminal cabal, which includes many shady characters in his inner circle, his lawyers, and the Trumptoadies in Congress. The Ukraine conspiracy is thus far more intricate and coordinated than even the most bitter Trump-haters could imagine. By the end of the interview, we got a sense of how useful idiots like Parnas were used and then thrown out by the White House when they ceased to be of help to their corrupt cause.
The Ukraine matter was thus carefully orchestrated at all levels of the Executive branch, from the Vice President to cabinet members to the legal team, all led in concert by the micro-manager president and his obsessive-compulsive need to have his political enemy Joe Biden investigated by President Zelensky.
Connecting the Trump malfeasance to Federalist #65 is truly child’s play.
Unsurprisingly, notwithstanding the mass of evidence against him, Dershowitz performed his usual PILPUL on the text, channeling the spirit of the Tosafist Rabbenu Tam:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/what-is-pilpul-and-why-on_b_507522
In that Huffington Post article, I actually mentioned Dershowitz by name:
The contentiousness of the Middle East conflict is intimately informed by pilpul. Whether it is Alan Dershowitz or Noam Chomsky, both of them Ashkenazim who had traditional Jewish educations, the terms of the debate are consistently framed by pilpul. What is most unfortunate about pilpul — and this is something that will be familiar to anyone who has followed the controversies involving Israel and Palestine — is that, since the rational has been removed from the process, all that is left is yelling, irrational emotionalism, and, ultimately, the threat of violence.
My discussion of PILPUL there was informed by Jose Faur’s seminal article “The Legal Thinking of the Tosafot” which helps us to better understand what is at stake in this debate:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/Davidshasha/tosafot/davidshasha/sxn6wDNrvX0/u4R45B3Cj-kJ
It is critical to see how Dershowitz qualifies and augments the Federalist text, with Tosafist Davqa and Lav Davqa quackery, in order to make his false and misleading assertions.
He insists that a president must commit an actual Federal crime, rather than commit corrupt acts which violate the public trust, as the text explicitly states.
To repeat the key point from the text:
The subjects of its jurisdiction are those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated POLITICAL, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.
Melber beat Dershowitz at his own Constitutional game, not that it means anything in the world of DA’AS TORAH and its occult magical world.
In addition, just to make things worse for Dershowitz, according to the non-partisan Government Accounting Office, Trump has actually committed a Federal crime by withholding Congressionally-mandated aid from Ukraine:
Naturally, in true PILPUL fashion, Dershowitz denies that that is a crime:
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15462/trump-had-right-to-withhold-ukraine-funds-gao-is
When the legal evidence is against you, just change how the evidence is interpreted.
Very TOSFOS.
So, it is not just Trump that is Above the Law, as we can clearly see Dershowitz thinks that he too is Above the Law; or rather, he is the only one who can properly interpret the Law to the rest of us commoners.
Do not believe what you see, believe the Dersh.
All hail Trump!
Conclusion: PILPUL is DA’AS TORAH is Trump Authoritarianism
In the wake the Melber interview, MSNBC legal analyst Paul Butler made a very important point about Dershowitz’s legal malfeasance. He claimed that Dershowitz was being inserted into the process in order to provide “cover” for the Republican Senators, who will naturally point to the “distinguished” Harvard professor as their reason for voting against witnesses and against removal. And that is deeply pernicious when it comes to having a real Senate trial according to Constitutional norms.
Dershowitz is therefore not just personally corrupt, but is intent on corrupting our democratic system of governance.
DA’AS TORAH is all about absolute authority and obeisance, and Dershowitz deploys his Harvard bona fides at every possible turn. If he says it, it must be true!
And this is why Trump is so excited to have Dershowitz on his legal team.
Trump watches a lot of television, and he knows that Dershowitz, like Starr and Ray, is a fixture there:
https://apnews.com/3a0f6c7518ce72e63374ddc9e01eeb18
But with Dershowitz he gets not only Jeffrey Epstein, but other pillars of society like O.J. Simpson, Mike Tyson, Harvey Weinstein, and Claus Von Bulow:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/17/us/politics/alan-dershowitz-trump.html
Can anyone say “Misogyny”?
Be careful what you wish for.
Trump has damaged our country in the worst way, and with Alan Dershowitz proudly standing with him we can see how PILPUL serves to undermine the very foundation of a healthy society. Crime is not crime, presidents can do whatever they want, citizens have no right to demand a clean government. You get the point.
Indeed, it is the same thing that has happened to Torah Judaism under White Jewish Supremacy; up is down, down is up, and there is ultimately no place to turn to get justice.
As Trump hyper-criminal Mick Mulvaney has said: “Get Over It!”:
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/10/mulvaney-ukraine-get-over-it.html
That is the essence of Trumpworld.
So, thank you Alan Dershowitz for all you have done to help destroy this country!
David Shasha