Harvard law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz told Just the News on Monday night that President Donald Trump may have grounds to pursue expungement or reversal of his 2019 impeachment, a move without precedent in American history, after newly declassified intelligence memos raised fresh questions about the whistleblower complaint that launched the entire affair.
The memos, declassified by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard at the request of Just the News, show that the intelligence community's own watchdog developed derogatory evidence about the CIA analyst behind the complaint. Investigators found the accuser submitted false information, relied on hearsay, and carried what they described as a "potential for bias", none of which was disclosed to the public or to Trump's defense team during the proceedings.
That combination, hidden exculpatory evidence, a compromised accuser, and a process that denied the defense the right to confront witnesses, is what Dershowitz says gives Trump a viable legal argument six years after the fact.
Dershowitz, who served on Trump's defense team during the Senate trial as a self-described Democrat, laid out several possible avenues during his appearance on the Just the News, No Noise television show. He said Trump could petition Chief Justice John Roberts, who presided over the impeachment trial, or return to Congress to ask that the impeachment be expunged. A civil lawsuit, he added, remained a third option.
Dershowitz acknowledged the novelty of the idea but did not shy away from it:
"It's never been done. I don't see any reason why it couldn't be done. Impeachment is a quasi-judicial procedure, whether you have to go back to Congress and ask them to expunge it or go to the courts."
He went further, arguing that the newly surfaced evidence had already done the work of discrediting the impeachment in the court of public opinion, even if no formal remedy follows.
"History will expunge it already based on your work, because what you've done is you've created so much doubt about the credibility of the main accuser that it's hard for anybody to sit back now and say that was a just, a just impeachment, but I don't know that there's going to be any remedy. Maybe we should try to create one."
The constitutional basis for his argument centers on the Sixth Amendment. Dershowitz said the defense team was denied the right to confront its accuser with exculpatory information that the government possessed, a direct violation, in his view, of the confrontation clause.
"This is a direct violation of the Constitution. The Sixth Amendment gives everybody a right to confront witnesses. The right to confront witnesses, the Supreme Court has held, includes the right to have the government provide you with the information they have necessary to confront those witnesses."
The documents at the center of this dispute trace back to August 2019, when the CIA analyst filed an initial intake form with the Intelligence Community Inspector General. That form included a line the public never saw at the time: "I do not have direct knowledge of private comments or communications by the President."
The analyst's complaint alleged that Trump improperly pressured Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to investigate Hunter Biden. But the allegations, as declassified records now reveal, rested entirely on second- and third-hand accounts of what Trump was alleged to have said and done.
Investigators documented additional concerns. The accuser was a registered Democrat. He had worked closely with Joe Biden on Ukraine issues. He expressed dislike for certain conservative figures in Trump's orbit. And investigators elicited an apology from the accuser for misleading the probe.
None of these facts reached the public during the impeachment fight. When then-House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff released a nine-page letter in late summer 2019 summarizing the complaint, the letter did not include the whistleblower's own admission that he lacked direct knowledge of the president's communications.
That omission is central to the current controversy. If the defense had access to the accuser's concession, and to the inspector general's derogatory findings, the impeachment proceedings might have unfolded very differently.
The revelations drew sharp responses from senior Trump administration officials. FBI spokesman Ben Williamson, writing on X, said the bureau is "closely" reviewing the new evidence. He framed the disclosure in blunt terms:
"The declassified impeachment memos show the so-called whistleblower behind the 2019 impeachment singled out Director Patel by name, relied on hearsay, submitted false claims, and had documented political bias, all of which was hidden from the American people."
Gabbard herself issued a pointed statement targeting former Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson, who forwarded the complaint to Congress in the summer of 2019:
"Despite a lack of any firsthand evidence, IC IG Atkinson proceeded to take actions to weaponize the Whistleblower process and exceed his statutory jurisdiction by ignoring Department of Justice guidance and relying on only second-hand testimony to ensure the whistleblower complaint was released to Congress, referred to the FBI, and leaked to the propaganda media."
CIA Director John Ratcliffe's office weighed in through CIA Director of Public Affairs Liz Lyons. Ratcliffe, who served in Congress and was a member of Trump's impeachment advisory team in 2019, had long maintained the proceeding was illegitimate.
"As Director Ratcliffe made clear as a member of President Trump's impeachment advisory team in 2019, this impeachment was entirely baseless, unfounded, and brought in politically-motivated bad faith."
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, who served in the House when the impeachment took place, was characteristically direct on X, calling the 2019 proceedings a "sham" and comparing them to the Russia collusion investigation that began in 2016. His language was colorful, he called it a "bulls*** show trial", but his point tracked with the broader administration consensus that the process was built on a rotten foundation.
Dershowitz did not limit his analysis to Trump's potential remedies. He argued that the officials who oversaw the impeachment process may themselves face consequences, political, if not legal, for what he characterized as constitutional violations.
"These government officials will probably have to pay a political price, if not a legal price, for violating the Constitution, because that's what they've done. They violated the Constitution."
The professor's involvement in the original defense was itself notable. As National Review reported at the time, Trump assembled a high-profile legal team that included both Dershowitz and the late Ken Starr. A spokesman for that team said Dershowitz was "participating in this impeachment trial to defend the integrity of the Constitution and to prevent the creation of a dangerous constitutional precedent." That framing, constitutional principle over partisan loyalty, is the same argument Dershowitz is making now, only with the benefit of evidence that was unavailable during the trial itself.
Whether any formal expungement effort materializes remains an open question. No president has ever sought to have an impeachment reversed after the fact. The Constitution does not spell out a mechanism for it. And even Dershowitz conceded he was proposing something untested.
But the political ground has shifted. The Democrat-led House impeached Trump in 2019. The Senate acquitted him. And now, years later, the evidence underlying the original complaint looks weaker than it did at the time, not because of partisan spin, but because of the government's own internal records.
That trajectory mirrors a pattern familiar to anyone who followed the broader accountability battles surrounding the intelligence community's conduct during the Trump years. Accusations were treated as established fact. Process was bent to serve a conclusion. And the exculpatory material stayed buried until someone forced it into the open.
Democrats have mounted repeated efforts to remove or sideline Trump through institutional mechanisms, from impeachment to 25th Amendment talk, and each time the underlying case has frayed under scrutiny. The 2019 impeachment was supposed to be the strongest of those efforts. If the declassified record is as damaging as Dershowitz and senior administration officials say it is, it may end up being remembered as the weakest.
The FBI says it is reviewing the evidence. Congress has the memos. The question now is whether anyone in a position of authority will act on what they show, or whether the impeachment of 2019 will simply stand as a monument to a process that hid the truth from the people it was supposed to serve.
When the government withholds evidence from the accused and calls it justice, the word for that isn't accountability. It's the opposite.
