George Conway Says This Is Trump’s Best Defense If He’s Indicted
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Conservative attorney George Conway on Sunday shared some advice regarding what former President Donald Trump’s legal strategy should be if he is ultimately indicted in New York, which is widely speculated to occur as soon as this week.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is reportedly on the verge of pressing criminal charges against Trump. The indictment would be in relation to an alleged 2016 campaign finance violation involving “hush money” payments to adult performer Stephanie Clifford, better known by her stage name Stormy Daniels. The former president suggested on Saturday morning that he expects to be indicted on Tuesday.
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George Conway has long been one of Trump’s fiercest public critics, despite his marriage to Kellyanne Conway, who served as a senior White House counselor to the former president and managed his 2016 presidential campaign. The couple confirmed at the beginning of March that they would be divorcing after more than two decades of marriage.
An avid Twitter user, Conway has consistently criticized, mocked and trolled Trump and his supporters for years. The news of the former president’s potential indictment and arrest has been no exception, and on Sunday he weighed in with some legal advice.
Conway retweeted a post from Huff Post White House correspondent S.V. Date, who wrote: “Are the coup-attempter’s lawyers intending to use these posts as their proof in an insanity defense?” The conservative lawyer then added his perspective, contending this would be a wise plan.
“It really is his best defense, but he’d never assert it,” Conway wrote.
Later on Sunday he added a follow-up, tweeting: “It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that a judge might order a psychiatric evaluation to make sure he’s competent to stand trial.”
The attorney is not the first to suggest that “insanity” would be a good plea for the former president should he face prosecution. In December, Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard, made the same argument in relation to potential charges Trump could face related to the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot.
“If this is the ‘defense’ at Trump’s forthcoming trial, I don’t envy the lawyers who agree to represent him. They’d better be psychiatrists expert at reflexive projection and capable of getting their client to plead insanity,” Tribe tweeted on Christmas, sharing a clip of Trump calling a report by the House select committee that investigated January 6 a “monstrous lie.”
It’s unclear whether Trump will face charges related to January 6. He remains under federal investigation in connection to the Capitol riot and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. That probe is led by special counsel Jack Smith.
Trump insists that he has done nothing wrong in connection to the New York case and the events of January 6. The former president and his allies say that all investigations targeting him and his supporters are politically motivated, and part of a liberal effort to undermine his reelection chances.
Bragg, a Democrat, and analysts who support an indictment in New York, have said that nobody is above the law, regardless of their political status. The district attorney has said that his investigation is simply following the facts.
If Trump is indicted, it will be unprecedented—as it would be the first time in U.S. history that a former president is criminally charged.
Other conservative legal analysts have criticized the case against Trump in New York, although the specific details of the potential charges are not fully known.
“Bragg’s [expected] indictment is Frankensteinian in its effort to assemble parts of the federal and state codes to reanimate a dead criminal theory,” Jonathan Turley, a professor at George Washington University Law School, tweeted on Sunday.
“It is the ultimate gravedigger charge, where Bragg unearthed a case from 2016 and, through a series of novel steps, is seeking to bring it back to life,” he added.
Newsweek reached out to Bragg’s office via email for comment. A spokesperson for Trump told Newsweek on Saturday that the former president “is rightfully highlighting his innocence and the weaponization of our injustice system.”
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