'Intellectual tour de force': George Conway says judge set Trump's legal team in a trap
Judge Florence Pan reportedly won the day and buried Trump's legal team in a couple sentences.
George Conway, a conservative attorney who is part of the anti-Trump group the Lincoln Project, expressed how dazzled he was while seated in the D.C. courtroom gallery on Tuesday during Trump's immunity appeal.
While interviewed on CNN's "The Source" with Kaitlan Collins, Conway rehashed how masterful the federal circuit court judge eviscerated the former president's legal team's attempt to claim absolute immunity involving his actions leading up to and on Jan. 6, 2021, when he is accused of conspiring to overturn the outcome of the presidential election and fomenting chaos in his supporters who stormed the Capitol Building.
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"It was an intellectual tour de force by Judge Pan," said Conway. "Not only did she highlight the extreme nature of their position, that a president might not be prosecutable for assassinating political rivals, she did something else... his exception -- his attempt to explain, 'Well, you could hold a president liable' was based upon that impeachment judgment clause, misreading it by saying that if you can prosecute a former president if they were convicted by the Senate."
"Well, the problem was that completely is inconsistent with their main position, which is the president is absolutely immune."
Trump's counsel Dean John Sauer tried to convince the panel of judges in the D.C. federal court on Tuesday that Trump as POTUS could make many orders and not be subject to criminal liability.
“Given that you’re conceding that presidents can be criminally prosecuted under certain circumstances, doesn’t that narrow the issues before us to ‘Can a president be prosecuted without first being impeached and convicted?"' Pan countered.
She added: “Your separation of powers argument falls away, your policy arguments fall away if you concede that a president can be criminally prosecuted under some circumstances."
Conway called the effort by Sauer and his team essentially turning lemons into rotten lemons.
They were "taking a bad argument, their immunity argument, and conflating it with another bad argument, which is something based upon the impeachment judgment clause, and mixing them all together in the hope of getting a stronger together," he said.
"And what happened was the Trump attorney, Sauer, set a trap for himself that judge Pan just completely, completely closed off."