Harvard Law School professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz on Thursday found himself facing a new round of criticism for his remarks defending President Donald Trump at his impeachment trial on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.

"Every public official that I know believes that his election is in the public interest. Mostly you are right. Your election is in the public interest," Dershowitz said Wednesday during the question-and-answer session of Trump's trial, which is set to continue this afternoon in the Senate. "If a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment."

Dershowitz was describing what he called "mixed motives" of presidential conduct, including a motive in the public interest; one done for political interest; and the other purely for a personal financial interest. His argument drew immediate questions from House managers and more broadly from legal scholars closely following the trial who said Dershowitz had essentially turned Trump into "the state" itself and immune from wrongdoing.

"Alan Dershowitz unimpeached Richard Nixon today. All Nixon was doing was obstructing justice and abusing power because he thought he was the best person for the USA to be POTUS," former Nixon White House lawyer John Dean said in a tweet.

Dershowitz has maintained in media interviews that he is not defending Donald Trump exclusively but instead, more broadly, the Constitution itself. "I'm here to defend future presidents, as well as the current president," he said Wednesday on the ABC News program "The View."

Here's a look at some of what legal scholars—many of whom are regular critics of Trump, or even suing him in various cases—said about Dershowitz's remarks:

>> Joshua Geltzer, founding executive director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection: "Sometimes things that sound like they are not right are just not right. What we know is that the Framers intended impeachment to be a protection against the abuse of public office, public trust, for private benefit. They made no distinction between private benefit in the form of personal re-election campaign versus private benefit in the form of a check in one's bank account. Here in Washington it's hard to say which some people value more. The president here is alleged to have done this for private benefit—his own re-election. That's in the realm of impeachable offenses." [CNN]

Sherrilyn Ifill. Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Photo by Diego M. Radzinschi/ ALM

>> Sherrilyn Ifill, head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund: "Dershowitz has just articulated a legal justification for a president to declare himself dictator or King." [Twitter]

>> Andrew Weissmann, former prosecutor on the Robert Mueller team and a senior fellow at NYU Law School's Center on the Administration of Criminal Law: "The fact that it was White House counsel is really interesting. Because this issue that the personal is the political and the political is the personal—that the president is the state—is embodied in the presidential team that is arguing this. It is one thing to have Dershowitz and private counsel make these arguments—because that's what they do. That's what private counsel is supposed to do. It is shocking—as somebody who's been in the Department of Justice for years—to see people who are paid by the public, these are public officers, arguing not just on behalf of the White House, and the White House's interest, that would be fine, but to be making arguments that are so flatly contradicted by the law that no responsible public servant would be making that. That's because there is absolutely no daylight between WH counsel and private counsel." [MSNBC]

>> Neal Katyal of Hogan Lovells and a former acting U.S. solicitor general in the Obama administration: "This is inane. The president could threaten people (including with our army) unless they voted for him? Could order a breakin [sic] of DNC headquarters? I'm not sure even Kings had such powers." [Twitter]

>> Frank Bowman, impeachment scholar at University of Missouri School of Law: "In making this argument, Alan is essentially alone, and I mean alone. What Dershowitz did yesterday was stand up and be a guy with Harvard attached to his name and spout complete nonsense that's totally unsupported by any scholarship, anywhere." [The Washington Post]