Constitutional contrarian Alan Dershowitz, lately appointed to Trump’s impeachment team, used to pride himself on defending victims of executive or prosecutorial abuse, and whistleblowers brave enough to speak out against it.

Not suprisingly, many of us who were once on his client list are shocked to see him now cozying up to a chronically lawless autocrat who delights in peddling lies, bullying the press and Congress, and hurling treason charges at the whistleblower who called him out for trying to extort political favors from Ukranian President Zelensky.

The Alan Dershowitz I once knew would have gone postal over such outrages. What’s happened to him?

In an early autobiography, “The Best Defense,” Dershowitz surveyed some of the breakthrough cases that launched his career – legal crusades on behalf of a male porn star (against obscenity charges), motion picture producers (against would-be censors) and a CIA agent who exposed intelligence failures during the last years of the Vietnam War.

That agent was me. In 1978 Justice Department officials prosecuted me for publishing my CIA/Vietnam memoir, “Decent Interval,” without agency approval. They claimed this violated official nondisclosure agreements and “fiduciary obligations” and had made unnamed foreign allies nervous.

Dershowitz volunteered to serve as my personal attorney free of charge while the ACLU and other civil libertarians headed by the venerable Mark Lynch and John Sims concentrated on nitty-gritty legal issues.                                                                       

Up close and personal, Dershowitz was pretty much the guy we’ve come to know from subsequent television appearances – brash, brilliant, overbearing in his self-confidence. One of my lawyers compared him to a self-absorbed princeling whose idea of fun is throwing fire crackers at the peasants.                                                                                     

During the two years Dershowitz represented me, he never met a camera he didn’t like and urged me to cultivate the press as well, on the theory that judges like to see their own names in print and can be swayed by the attention. As he would later confess publicly, he considered me “a bit boring,” given my instinctive southern reserve and penchant for addressing him as “sir.” But in legal terms he regarded me as a cause worth fighting for.

What elevated my case to constitutional status was the government’s decision not to charge me with exposing any official secrets or even any nonpublic information. In effect I was crucified for simply publishing embarrassing non-secrets without authorization. That raised all sorts of questions about the authority of the President (and executive agencies like the CIA) to tamper with First Amendment rights and Constitutional values in general, especially in the absence of any explicit enabling legislation.

Also in the balance was the fate of whistleblowers-to-come. Did the government have the power to punish someone for fingering official malfeasance when there was no concrete proof that the exposure had done any harm to a substantial public interest or the nation’s security?

Dershowitz and my legal team answered an emphatic no to these questions. One of the precedents they cited was the famous steel seizure case of 1952 in which the Supreme Court had found that presidential power has distinct limitations under the Constitution, especially when it infringes on civil liberties, and even more when there has no specific law to back it up.

The ruling seemed to bode well for me. But for various arcane and seemingly political reasons the Supreme Court rendered a summary judgment against me and upheld the enforceability of government nondisclosure agreements – i.e. fault-free prior restraint on free speech imposed by executive fiat alone.

It was a blow for an expansive view of presidential power, exactly what we’re dealing with today

In “The Best Defense,” Dershowitz described U.S. v Snepp as one of the “the most dangerous, far reaching and important decisions ever rendered by the Supreme Court in the area of free speech.”                                                                                

Despite having lost the case, he emerged from it with his credentials as a “civil libertarian” nicely burnished. He would soon add to his renown by launching a crusade to abolish the death penalty in America and would go on to champion expanded legal protections for a variety of under-represented and often oppressed minorities.                                          

In more recent years he has ranged beyond his public interest brevet to advocate for a Clown Car of controversial clients including Claus Von Bulow, O.J. Simpson and Jeffrey Epstein. He has also rallied to Israel’s defense, a commitment that may have helped nudge him into Trump’s corner. During the Obama years he criticized the administration for (allegedly) not being even-handed enough in the Israel/Palestinian conflict and he has applauded Trump for moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem.

In one of his more recent books, “Taking the Stand,” Dershowitz acknowledged being pushy and excessively outspoken. He called this side of him the “Dersh character” but argued defensively that cultivating a high profile helps him win public support for the more serious causes espoused by the soberer “true Alan.”

He also defended his embrace of patently unsavory clients as a way of insuring that everybody gets a fair shake in court and the public commons. It was just such ecumenism that prompted him in the late 1970s to support the right of Neo-Nazis to march on the streets of Skokie, Illinois.                                                    

But in recent years politics and self-interest have begun to color his advocacy. He has declined to support Muslim student protestors who dared interrupt a speech by Israel’s ambassador to the UN, and he has allegedly tried to keep a book out of print that he says contains falsehoods about him.

Moreover, his rationales for taking on seedy clients can sometimes sound contrived. “I think of myself like a doctor or a priest,” he declared recently. “If they wheel Jeffrey Epstein into the emergency ward, the doctor is going to take care of him.”

Though I remain deeply grateful to Dershowitz for the help he gave me, I am sorry his “Dersh character” has begun to eclipse some of the more cause-oriented work the “true Alan” did in the past.

And his recent evolution into an apologist for Trump leaves my head spinning. In both effect and implication, it runs counter to so many of the Constitutional values and righteous imperatives that have distinguished him, including his avowed desire to keep executive power in check and the other branches of government vibrant co-guarantors of our democracy.                                                                        

Since being named to the Trump impeachment team, he has tried to placate liberal admirers by insisting he is still on the side of the angels and is representing the Constitution itself, not Trump or his policies.  But months ago, while belaboring the Mueller investigation on Trump’s behalf he treated the idea of actually lawyering for the President as a bridge too far.

No longer. Consistency, it seems, is not Dershowitz’ strong suit when it comes to this President, a failing he shares with others who make up Trump’s cult-like fanbase.

Over the past weekend, on Sunday talk shows, he telegraphed the main arguments in his Trump defense brief. Acknowledging that he has never favored impeachment for fear of its being weaponized by hyper-partisans, he declared that the two “articles” the House has delivered to the Senate for trial are constitutionally flawed.

“Abuse of power, as he sees it, suffers from not being readily identifiable with any of the impeachable offenses enumerated in the constitution: “Treason, bribery and other high crimes and misdemeanors.”

He dismissed the second article, “obstruction of Congress,” as simply “made up.”

These arguments helped legitimize Republican efforts to bar all potential witnesses and evidentiary documents from the impeachment trial, the reasoning being that without an indictable crime there is no need for them.

As Dershowitz acknowledged in his weekend press blitz, he cribbed his animating themes from former Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Curtis who represented President Andrew Johnson during his impeachment trial in 1868. Curtis helped win Johnson an acquittal by arguing that impeachment and removal from office require proof of an actual violation of law. “Otherwise,” he insisted, “there is no crime.”

Dershowitz interprets this to mean that an impeachment charge must be linked to some “criminal-like conduct,” or it simply isn’t actionable.

He made the same sort of objection to Robert Mueller’s investigation into alleged Trump-Russia collusion, claiming the inquiry wasn’t justified because “collusion” isn’t a “specific offense” in the U.S. criminal code.                                     

In fact, Mueller recognized this problem himself and adjusted to it by basing his final judgments on well-established conspiracy law under which certain kinds of “coordination” between two parties can indeed be prosecuted.

In the end he and his team defined “coordination” so narrowly they were unable to find enough admissible evidence to nail Trump and his aides.

As a result, Dershowitz’ caviling about collusion turned out to be much ado about nothing — except that it did help distract public attention from Trump’s loathsome behavior, his willingness to encourage and accept Russian election interference and to abet Putin in covering it up.

Dershowitz’ objections to the impeachment package may prove equally tenuous. The General Accounting office reported last week that administration officials had violated the impoundment control act by freezing Congressionally approved aid to Ukraine. Since the act does not allow for criminal penalties, it is a weak reed on which to hang a high-crimes-and-misdemeanor charge. But it does provide grounds for arguing corrupt intent on Trump’s part, and an abuse of power, since he knew or should have known that withholding aid was an illegal act.

Ironically, one of the strongest raps against Dershowitz’ anti-impeachment riff comes from his own lips. In 1998, during the Clinton impeachment trial, he told CNN that an impeachable offense “certainly doesn’t have to be a crime.”

“If you have somebody who completely corrupts the office of president and who abuses trust and who poses great danger to our liberty, you don’t need a technical crime,” he explained.  

He is currently arguing just the opposite.

When challenged about this in a recent CNN interview, he assured Anderson Cooper and a fellow panelist, “I wasn’t wrong (in 1998), I’m just far more correct now than I was then. And I think your viewers are entitled to hear my views without two bullies jumping on everything I say.”                                                

Talk about the pot calling kettle black.

There are also problems with Alan’s gloss on his main inspiration source, Justice Curtis’ brief in the Johnson trial. A close reading of  it reveals that Curtis’ definition of an impeachable offense did not hinge on something being written down but could rest on what he called “unwritten” or “implied” law.

That made perfect sense. When the Founders drafted the Constitution there was no criminal code. Experience and practice-driven English common law were the guiding principles, and high crimes and misdemeanors were understood to be abuses of power by the Crown. As George Conway, Kelly Ann’s lawyerly husband, noted in a recent op-ed, “the English parliamentary history upon which the framers adopted impeachment makes clear that a public official’s breach of duty to put the public interest first constitutes an impeachable, removable offense.”

Constitutional guru Lawrence Tribe has been particularly hard on Dershowitz for his handling and mishandling of such issues. In a weekend tweet storm he described his former Harvard law school colleague as someone “not to be trusted” and mocked him for waffling on whether an impeachable offense must be an indictable one.

“Those who say abuse of power is too nebulous to count as impeachable (but who’ve had to admit that no actual crime is needed) are now saying that only crime-like a crime-type behavior qualifies,” wrote Tribe. “Who could possibly figure out what that means?”

In a soberer Washington Post article he decried “the suggestion that, even if some noncriminal offenses might be impeachable, abuse of power is not among them.” In an obvious dig at Dershowitz he declared, “No serious scholar has ever agreed with it.”

He then launched into passionate reminder of what’s at stake in the current trial, arguing that whenever a president abuses his authority for personal gain “he injures the country as a whole,”

Waiting for the next election, he continued, is not a sufficient remedy “when the abuse of power is directed at cheating in that very election.”

Dershowitz’ theatricality, his capacity to mesmerize, may ultimately bamboozle enough Senators into embracing the excuses he has conjured for acquitting Trump. But like the US military in Vietnam he risks burning down the village in his effort to save it. For whatever he does to help Trump and strengthen support for him in the Senate will surely leave the president better armed and motivated to keep on trashing the Constitution and everything Dershowitz once claimed to stand for.