Media's bad faith reporting on statements in defense of Trump's actions in Ukraine

David Marcus:

Media Continues Dishonesty On Dershowitz’s Argument Against Impeachment

Of course Alan Dershowitz is not arguing that nothing a president does in pursuit of reelection can be impeachable. And the news media knows it.

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What these breathless accounts of Dershowitz’s words have in common is just how wrong they are. Let’s look at the quote in question. He says, “If the president does something that he thinks will help him get elected, in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment.” The context here matters a lot, and in fairness Dershowitz could have been a bit clearer. In fact, he did clarify his remarks in the evening session of senators’ questions.

Prior to this selection of his statements, Dershowitz laid out three types of motives the president could have had for his actions. First, one purely and solely concerned with the national interest, second one in which his motive also includes his electoral interests, and third one in which personal gain is his only motivation. In the quote in question, he was talking directly about that second possibility, which he would later describe as “mixed motives.”

This is extremely important because Dershowitz is predicating his argument that the president may act in the interest of his own electoral chances but only if he believes those actions to be in the broader national interest. Dershowitz is not saying that the president could kill a political rival and it wouldn’t be impeachable if he thought that killing was in the national interest. First of all, murder is a crime, and there is no crime alleged in the impeachment, which lies at the heart of Dershowitz’s broader constitutional argument.
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I knew this is what he meant when he said it.  But the first instinct of the anti-Trump media is to deceive if they think they can get away with it.   It is absurd to argue as the Democrats did that the President cannot ask for help in a corruption investigation if the person being investigated is a Democrat who might run against Trump.  That is clearly a bad faith argument designed to benefit the corrupt in an opposition party.