Rob Natelson Confirms Dershowitz Opinion Regarding Impeachment

Constitutional scholar Rob Natelson of the Independence Institute appeared on the KGVO Talk Back show on Monday and commented on the opinion of Alan Dershowitz, one of President Trump’s attorneys, regarding the issue of high crimes and misdemeanors and the President’s impeachment.

Natelson initially disagreed with Dershowitz’ opinion that none of the President’s actions fell under the category of ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’, and therefore were not impeachable.

Natelson said on Monday that Dershowitz’ opinion caused him to look deeper into the founding documents of the U.S. Constitution and discovered that Dershowitz was actually correct.

“What I found was that ‘high misdemeanors’ was in fact a very common term during the founding era, as was the term ‘misdemeanor’ and it had a rather clear meaning,” Natelson said. “There’s another encyclopedia that defines ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’ as also being very serious crimes, next to high treason.”

Natelson did further research into law books of the time.

“The law books themselves give various examples of high misdemeanors and explain how serious they were,” he said. “Basically what we’re seeing here is that Professor Dershowitz is right in that in order for a bill of impeachment be valid it’s got to state a crime or crimes that the President committed.”

Natelson continued to emphasize Dershowitz’ point of law.

“The same definition of high misdemeanors is used in correspondence by John Jay,” he said. “It is used in the Articles of Confederation, which of course governed the United States before the Constitution, and the term is also used in several bills passed by Congress in the 1790’s.  So, there really should be no mystery about what ‘high misdemeanors’ means.”

Hear the entire conversation with Rob Natelson on the KGVO Facebook page.

He appears every month on Talk Back from the Independence Institute in Denver.

Natelson is a former law professor at the University of Montana, and the author of ‘The Original Constitution; What it Actually Said and Meant’.