Conservative attorney George Conway said Tuesday that the presidential immunity argument made by former President Trump’s legal team in federal court Tuesday “made absolutely no sense.”
Trump’s lawyers took a firm position in attempting to persuade an appeals panel that he is immune from prosecution for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, arguing that former presidents can only face prosecution if they have first been impeached and convicted by the Senate.
Conway, a Trump critic who is divorcing former Trump aide Kellyanne Conway, sat in the back row of the courtroom taking notes during the hearing. As one of the judges grilled Trump’s attorney, he made a throat-slitting gesture, The Hill previously reported.
“So what he’s saying, on one hand, is saying we can’t have presidents prosecuted because … it could be political, and then he’s saying that the political Congress gets to decide,” Conway told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on Wednesday. “It made absolutely no sense. And I was there in the courtroom. … And it was just, it was devastating.”
The three-judge panel warned that Congress may not always choose to impeach a president for unlawful conduct, which would prohibit prosecutors from later acting on new evidence if it went unpursued by the Senate.
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Conway said that 10 minutes into the argument, Judge Florence Pan, a President Biden appointee, “just completely demolished” Trump’s lawyer. At that moment, Conway said, “you knew right then you didn’t have to hear anything else.”
“I mean, the rest of the … event was kind of anticlimactic after those exchanges,” he said.
Trump attended the hearing in person before the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals, leaving the campaign trail just days before the Iowa caucuses are set to begin.
Trump’s attorney, John Sauer, was pressed by the panel with hypothetical situations about the extent a president would be shielded from prosecution under presidential immunity if they weren’t impeached for the conduct. He even suggested that a president directing SEAL Team Six to kill a political opponent would be barred from prosecution.
Conway suggested that in the hearing, Sauer “set a trap for himself” that Pan “completely closed off” with an “intellectual tour de force.”