Appearing on CNN's "New Day" with hosts Brianna Keilar and John Berman, conservative attorney -- and ardent Donald Trump critic -- George Conway had few good things to say about members of Trump's inner circle who kept quiet about his private behavior during his administration.
Conway -- whose wife Kellyanne was one of Trump's closest advisers for four years -- was first asked about a reported confrontation between the ex-president and former Vice President Mike Pence and used that as a springboard to talk about other Trump administration insiders who stood by and bit their tongues until after the election was a foregone conclusion.
Responding to the report that Pence snapped at Trump in front of other aides, Conway began, "Well, I think the moral of the story is you can only take so much, even Mike Pence. I can only say, though, that I wish that we had seen a little more of that Mike Pence publicly and not heard it after everything was over when people are trying to rehabilitate their reputations."
"I mean, the fact of the matter is there should have been more pushback on the president and more pushback publicly on the president when President Trump -- when he did outrageous things. I just wish we had seen more of that from Mike Pence," he added before turning to former Attorney General Bill Barr.
"You can never please the man," Conway said of Trump. "Bill Barr did so much to humor Donald Trump, and yet it wasn't enough. I mean, it wasn't enough, because as described in, I think Jonathan Karl's excerpt which covers some of the same material, it wasn't enough for Trump because Trump -- Barr didn't, at the end of the day, engage in litigation on behalf of the fake election fraud claims. He didn't indict Hunter Biden. He didn't issue the [John] Durham report. He didn't indict Jim Comey. Nothing was ever enough for Donald Trump."
"The reason why it got so out of hand was, you know, people didn't push back at the interim steps," he continued. "They acceded to some of his desires and wishes in certain ways, and Barr was the biggest -- one of the biggest people humoring Trump. and it just gets worse and worse and worse."
"I wonder what you think about [former Secretary of State] Mike Pompeo's portrayal here," Berman suggested. "He certainly would fit into the category. This book reveals he warned colleagues, quote, 'the crazies have taken over' as Trump's fraud conspiracy theories were growing after the election."
"That's really nice that he thought that and he said that privately," Conway smirked. "Why didn't he go -- come here, go on to Fox and say that? Why? And we're all hearing it now. 'Oh, the crazies were there,' 'There was nobody there to push back,' 'It's terrible,' 'Look, it's Rudy Giuliani's fault.' Well, you could have said something at the time, all these folks and they didn't and that's the most outrageous thing about it. They knew better."
Watch below:
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