George Conway shows how he'd try to help Trump if he were his lawyer

How could former President Donald Trump defend himself against the new round of charges for the election fraud plots?

That's what anti-Trump conservative attorney George Conway sought to answer in a new discussion with Ruth Marcus published in The Washington Post on Thursday.

The former president's legal team has been trying out a few defense theories, including that he had a First Amendment right to say that the 2020 election was rigged regardless of whether it was true; that he had a good-faith belief everything he was saying was true; and that he was simply acting on the advice of incompetent legal counsel — all of which have been broadly dismissed as dubious defenses by legal experts.

Rather than any of that, Conway told Marcus, he'd urge Trump to just try to get a deal.

"I would tell him that he needs to own up to it and plead guilty and work out a deal with the government," said Conway. "One of the things that the Justice Department will consider doing in settling, in plea-bargaining political corruption cases, is to take a commitment from the defendant, an enforceable commitment from the defendant, not to hold public office again, to resign. [Vice President Spiro] Agnew had to resign as part of his nolo contendere plea in 1973. And so what I would say is, you need to work out the best deal possible, and you just have to say, you’re just gonna leave public life and pay a fine, and I’d do my best to keep him out of prison."

The one drawback to this potential strategy, Conway added, is that an agreement to keep him out of public office again would be immediately challenged as political. "The problem with it, of course, is that even the suggestion of it that came from the Justice Department would be pointed to by Trump and his supporters as 'Ah, this is why you’re doing that,'" he said.

But it's actually perfectly valid and important, he argued: "One of the reasons we have to do this, why we have to make sure we enforce the law, is so that somebody can’t do this again."