George Conway: “Trump Deserves to Spend His Life in Prison”

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, INTERNATIONAL HOST: Now, in U.S. presidential politics, Former President Trump continues to bounce around from courthouse to the campaign trail. This morning, he was back to face trial for his statements about former columnist E. Jean Carroll’s sexual assault allegations in 2019. Just ahead of the New Hampshire primary, he got a boost from Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who decided to drop out of the race and back him. Conservative lawyer, George Conway, now joins Michel Martin with incisive analysis on how Trump’s legal woes are playing out and shaping this campaign.

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MICHEL MARTIN, NPR: Thanks, Christiane. George Conway, thank you so much for talking with us.

GEORGE CONWAY, CONSERVATIVE LAWYER: Thank you for having me.

MARTIN: So, look, I know you’re a lawyer and a legal analyst. You’re not a political analyst per se. But I did want to get your take on what we’ve just seen in Iowa. As we are speaking now, the Iowa caucuses are just behind us. You know, it’s, by all accounts, decisive victory for the former president there. Just what are your thoughts about that?

CONWAY: Well, I mean, this is where we are. I mean, I’ve been saying for quite some time that I thought that we’re going to have the first, for the first time, running as a major party candidate and a convicted felon, and that’s what he — I think he will be that by the time the fall rolls around, because I do think the trial here in the District of Columbia of the January 6th trial, the one brought — the case brought by Jack Smith, just against him before Judge Chutkan here in the district, I think that one’s going to go to trial. You know, it’s just a remarkable confluence of first. I mean, we have the first adjudicated rapist who is going to win a major party nomination, the first person who has been — you know, who is under indictment in four separate jurisdictions with 91 counts. I mean, it is just absolutely unprecedented. But with Donald Trump, it’s almost inevitable that this was going to happen.

MARTIN: Do you have any thoughts about why these very serious allegations don’t seem to make much difference in the political realm. I mean, you have, you know, close connections to people in the Republican political world, and I’m just interested in what you think about that.

CONWAY: It’s partisanship run amok in part, and that I think a lot of this — I mean, and I do think there is some segment of the population that wants a strong man, and I don’t mean that in a complimentary way. I mean that in the — in the sense of a quasi-dictatorial, authoritarian figure. They want to just basically assume the facts that they think are true, are true. They don’t want to think, they don’t, they’re not interested in evidence. But I think another thing that’s going on here, I think a lot of this is that people don’t want to admit that they were wrong about Donald Trump. They don’t want to admit that he’s a bad person because if they admit that he’s a bad person, then they, by extension, are admitting that they are not good people for supporting him, or at least it tarnishes them in their own eyes. So, they have to justify where they’ve been and where they’re going, because they just don’t want to admit that he led them astray and that they’ve been suckered and that they’re wrong and that he’s bad. I think that’s just a big part of it.

MARTIN: Is that true? Do you think that’s true for people in your own orbit?

CONWAY: Oh, well, you know, I mean, my orbits changed over the last few years. But I think, you know, part of it is not wanting to admit you’re wrong. But part of it also is, there’s an identity there. There’s a tribalism there. And, you know, you don’t want to be excluded from the tribe because you don’t — you think the other tribe, the liberals who you’ve been hating on for so many years, they’re never going to accept you. And if you dare question the leader, you’ll be cast out of your own group and you’ll be homeless. The other thing that I think is going on is there’s an economy that has been built around Trump and Trumpers. I think that there’s a whole — you know, you have all of these consultants and all these politicians whose livelihoods or their chosen careers or their chosen course of their lives is dependent upon not, antagonizing other people in that community. And so — I mean, you see that with members of Congress who are — who have to fear being primary. You see that with political consultants. I mean, for example, the — it was reported just the other day that the Trump campaign is saying nobody should hire Jeff Roe, who was a political adviser, a chief political adviser for Ron DeSantis, that they — he’s going to be blacklisted. And nobody wants to be blacklisted. Nobody wants to be cast out of the tribe. And there is just — there’s also fear of physical intimidation. I mean, I think we saw that to some extent, with Lindsey Graham back in January of 2021, where he dared otter that he’d been — he was done with Trump or something like that, and he was accosted at an airport by Trumpers. And you saw it also — I mean, one of the things that you’ve seen when Liz Cheney was running for re-election in Wyoming, she had to have the big security detail in Wyoming, which she never owned. And there is a — there is certainly a degree of physical intimidation. And that — you know, frankly, that’s what January 6th was all about.

MARTIN: So, let’s pivot around to the subject that sort of brought us together today, which is you have actually said that you think that Trump will “spend the rest of his life in jail.” Do you really think that?

CONWAY: I do think that. I mean, he’s either going to become president or he’s going to spend the rest of his life in prison. He certainly deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison. I think that if you take any combination of the counts in these four indictments, with which he’s been charged, it will take almost any conviction and almost any combination of them is going to put him in jail for a number of years. And, you know, this is a 77-year-old man. So, I think there is a very good chance he’ll spend the rest of his life in jail. And that’s part of the dynamic that is going on here. He knows that. I mean, he’s not a strategic thinker. He’s a sociopath. He’s a man with a reptilian, I’m not going to say intellect, but he understands that he is cornered. And that’s when people — you know, people like him with that kind of psychology are the most dangerous. But he understands that he understands that the only way for him to escape the trouble that he’s in is to be elected president.

MARTIN: Do you think that the purpose of this presidential campaign is to keep him out of jail?

CONWAY: I think that is one major purpose. I think another major purpose is to — he does — you know, he’s motivated by the things that motivate narcissistic sociopaths, which is power, praise, and a desire to inflict revenge on people who have defied him. And I think that we’ve seen that in some of what — you know, what his people are planning for 2025 should he be elected. I mean, they’re going to seek retribution. He says he’s seeking retribution on behalf of the American public, or at least his slice of the American public. But that’s what motivates him. I don’t think you can understand what Donald Trump says and does on a daily basis simply by saying, oh, he’s a bad guy. He’s a Republican. He’s an authoritarian. He’s racist. He’s misogynist. He’s this or that. You have to tie it into his fundamental psychological profile. People should not shy away from that. OK. because I do not think you can understand his behavior without understanding his psychology. And I think we’re seeing that in the courtroom as it’s happening today, over this week in the E. Jean Carroll trial, going to see it even more in the future.

MARTIN: So, let’s talk about of the — he’s got — there are 91 felony accounts — felony counts across four cases. What do you think is the strongest of those?

CONWAY: Oh, well, I think the strongest one — the strongest case, I think, is — which is a slam dunk case because it’s so simple, is the case in Florida, the Mar-a-Lago documents case. You know, there is no — there’s really no factual dispute about what happened there because he was caught red handed with the documents. The documents that do not belong to him. They belong to the United States of America. They had classified document markings. And it doesn’t even matter that they were, in fact, “classified” because the charges that he has been — that were filed against him include charges under the Espionage Act, and those charges do not turn on specific mark — whether they’re specifically marked as classified, they simply turn on whether or not it’s national defense information of any degree of significant sensitivity. And you have that, and the fact that there are witnesses and there’s video and all sorts of evidence that he tried to hide those and did hide those documents from the FBI and that he failed to produce them when he was served with a subpoena by the Department of Justice and that he had his lawyers lie to the Department of Justice. And that’s — those are simple, simple, easily provable acts of obstruction of justice. And when that case goes to trial, I think — I don’t know that it’s going to go to trial this year because it’s hard to say what the judge there is doing in terms of scheduling, but I don’t — he doesn’t have a defense in that case, just not a shred of a defense.

MARTIN: The other case that has gotten a lot of attention and that you have written about most recently is the case connected to the former president’s role in the January 6th mob attack on the Capitol. And in that case, one of the things that has gotten a lot of attention from legal analysts and legal scholars is this very sweeping claim basically saying that he has total immunity for anything that he does or anything that he did while in the office of the presidency. So, you wrote about that. And the headline of the piece was that “Trump’s Lawyer Walked Into a Trap.” What’s the trap he walked into? Would you just lay that out for us?

CONWAY: Well, the trap that they walked into was that they were pushing arguments that were in tension with each other, or they were pushing — for example, they were — their principal argument is that there is an inherent immunity in the constitution that comes with the president that means that you cannot be subject to — essentially to any legal process. They — that does not — that line of cases has never been applied to presidents in the criminal context. It’s been applied in the civil context. And the cases are based upon the notion that if you have — you know, the president does things that affect so many people, that if you allow them all to sue, if he did something that harmed them, the president would be continually — and sue the president personally for damages, you’d end up with a situation where the president would be worrying about everything he does and who is going to sue him for what. And the president will be worried more about his personal finances and more about the cost of defending litigation than he would be actually doing his job. But again, that rationale only applies to — in the civil context, and it only extends, by the terms of the case law, the case — the leading case being — a case called Nixon against Fitzgerald, which was decided in 1982, to the outer perimeter of the president’s official responsibilities. Now, that’s a pretty broad standard. It’s basically as broad as you can make it reasonably. But it’s — you know, it doesn’t apply to essentially conducting a coup. But the other point is, it’s never been applied to the criminal context. And that’s the thing that I think he’s going to absolutely lose on, which is the notion that somehow you can extend this civil liability doctrine to the criminal context. Now, the trap that he set for himself is what had he made a secondary argument, an argument that is extremely weak based upon something called the impeachment judgment clause. And what the impeachment judgment clause of the Constitution, which is an Article 1 of the constitution, because it deals with Congress’s powers, it says that, if you — if some — if an officer of the United States is removed from office by the impeachment process, in other words impeached by the House and convicted by the Senate and removed as a result of the Senate conviction, he can nonetheless be charged in the courts of law thereafter for any criminal conduct that the — that was covered by the impeachment. What Trump has been arguing is that by — you could flip that over and say, you can only be charged if you are convicted by the Senate. And that’s not what the clause says. But what he did also and what his lawyers did at this argument was, at the same time that they were making this broad absolute criminal immunity argument, they were saying — and they were saying that we need that broad criminal immunity because we have to fear political prosecutions. When one administration goes in and tries to prosecute the people in the last administration, the president of the last administration, he’s saying, we can’t have that because we need to protect from political prosecutions. But then they’re saying at the same time, the exception is if the president is convicted by the Senate, you can nonetheless charge it, which is inconsistent with the claim of absence of immunity.

MARTIN: Right. Because that’s a political proceeding. The impeachment is a political proceeding. It’s not a criminal proceeding. Mr. Conway, you were actually in the courtroom. Can you just try to describe the argument and the exchange between one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers and Judge Florence Pan, where you kind of laid out what you’re describing as the difficulties of that argument?

CONWAY: Yes. I mean, what she was doing was she was trying to pin him down and get a concession from him that he was arguing for immunity so broad and so absolute that a president of the United States could send Seal Team Six up to the capitol or wherever to assassinate political — a political rival and be immune from prosecution for that criminal act. And she — he was refusing to give that concession cleanly. He was saying, yes, but, and the but was, oh, but a president could still — certainly, a president that did that would be impeached and removed, and then he could be prosecuted because that’s what the impeachment judgment clause that I described earlier says. The problem with that is that means the president isn’t absolutely immune, and that was sort of the gotcha, the trap that Judge Pan was leading the lawyer into. And the lawyer realized he was being cornered and he kept trying to avoid falling into the trap by trying to talking as fast as he could and talking about things other than that weren’t responsive to her answer. And then there’s also the tension involved between, you know, his position that the president shouldn’t be prosecutable because we fear political prosecutions, while at the same time saying, but a president can be prosecuted if the most political body in the United States, or in the United States government, which is the Congress of the United States, says so. And so, basically, when she got done with him, his position looked nonsensical. It looked ridiculous. And that was only about 10 or 15 minutes into the argument, and he knew which way the panel was going to come out at that point, because he didn’t get any help from any of the other judges.

MARTIN: You know what, look, he is like any defendant entitled to a vigorous defense, right?

CONWAY: Yes.

MARTIN: So — and he is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, like any defendant. But, I mean, it is one of sort of the axioms of the American experience that no one is above the law in the United States.

CONWAY: Right.

MARTIN: No one. I mean, it is sort of fundamental, not just to American identity, but to American law. Like, that is who we say we are. And I sort of wonder, is there any part of you that worries, as an officer of the court, that someone is making an argument that — you know, that someone, this particular singular figure can never be prosecuted or held to account in court for anything that he does? I just — so, I just wondered if you thought about that?

CONWAY: Well, I do. I mean, I don’t think it’s an argument that, you know, should cause someone to lose their bar license. But I do think it’s an argument that is very, very dangerous if it were ever taken too seriously. And here’s why. It’s not just that we are a nation of laws and not of individuals. But it’s the fact that this is part and parcel of what an authoritarian leader wants to have, authoritarian leaders. If you talk to students of history and students of international political science and what they will tell you is that, you know, authoritarians are criminals. And they — one of the things that they seek is the ability to do whatever they please and make the law whatever they want and make it the law — make people of their choosing subject to the law while nonetheless not being subject to the law themselves. This is not really that new for Trump. I mean, Trump is someone who said, I think back in 2019 or 2018, Article 2 of the Constitution, the part of the constitution that deals with the president, allows me to do whatever I want. He actually believes that. But that’s — again, that’s because of — that’s — he believes that not because he’s a legal scholar, but that’s his essential nature.

MARTIN: George Conway, thank you for speaking with us.