Conservative lawyer George Conway said Wednesday that former President Trump's defense team's claims of presidential immunity made Tuesday in federal court “made absolutely no sense.”
Trump's lawyers have taken a strong position in an attempt to persuade an appellate panel to grant him immunity from prosecution over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, saying the former president should be impeached and convicted by the Senate. He argued that he could only be prosecuted.
Trump critic Conway, who is divorced from former President Trump aide Kellyanne Conway, sat in the back row of the courtroom taking notes during the hearing. The Hill previously reported that as one of the judges grilled Trump's lawyer, he made a gesture that suggested he was going to slit his throat.
“So what he's saying is, on the one hand, you can't have the president prosecuted because it could be political. And he's saying that the political Congress I'm saying you have to make a decision.” Conway told CNN. Caitlan Collins on Wednesday. “It just didn't make any sense. And I was in court. … And it was just, devastating.”
The three-judge panel found that Congress does not necessarily choose to impeach a president for misconduct, and that prosecutors cannot subsequently act on new evidence if the Senate does not pursue it. I warned him that he wouldn't be able to do it.
Conway said Judge Florence Pan, who was appointed by President Biden, “completely defeated” Trump's lawyers 10 minutes into arguments. At that moment, Conway said, “You knew right then and there that you didn't need to hear anything else.”
“So after that kind of interaction, the rest of the event was sort of climactic in a way,” he said.
Trump attended a hearing in person at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and left the campaign trail just days before the Iowa caucuses began.
Trump's lawyer, John Sauer, was asked by the committee about a hypothetical situation about how much presidential immunity would protect the president from prosecution if he were not impeached for his actions. He even suggested that a president who directs SEAL Team 6 to kill a political opponent would be barred from prosecution.
Mr. Conway suggested during the hearing that Mr. Sauer had “set a trap for himself” and that Mr. Pang had “completely contained” him with his “high intellectual capacity.”
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