Adam Schiff Rips Dershowitz’s ‘Absurdist’ Trump Defense: Abuse of Power ‘Would Have Appalled the Founders’

House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) said President Donald Trump’s legal team “can’t contest the facts” in response to their first official argument against impeachment.

During an interview on Sunday with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, Schiff was asked for his thoughts about how Trump’s defense team refuted every charge against him in their first trial filing. Schiff called it a collection of “failed arguments” and that “they can’t contest those facts” that Trump tried to pressure the Ukrainian government into investigating his political foes.

Stephanopoulos went on to ask Schiff to react to Alan Dershowitz’s argument on behalf of Trump’s defense that “abuse of power – even if proved – is not an impeachable offense.”

“That’s the argument I suppose you have to make if the facts are so dead-set against you,” Schiff answered. “You had to go so far out of the mainstream to find someone to make that argument. You had to leave the realm of constitutional law scholars and go to criminal defense lawyers.”

Schiff continued to argue that Dershowitz was advancing an “absurdist position,” and that abuse of power “is at the center of what the Framers intended an impeachable offense to be.”

“The mere idea of this would have appalled the Founders who were worried about exactly that kind of solicitation of foreign interference in an election for personal benefit,” Schiff said. “The danger it poses to national security, that goes to the very heart of what the framers intended to be impeachable.”

Watch above, via ABC.