'A bizarre document': George Conway dismantles Trump's SCOTUS appeal point by point
Appearing on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" on Thursday morning, conservative attorney George Conway held up a copy of Donald Trump's appeal to the Supreme Court to stay on the ballot in Colorado, labeled it "bizarre," and then proceeded to tear it apart point by point.
Speaking with hosts Mika Brzezinski and Willie Geist, Conway suggested that Trump's lawyers were in over their heads based on his reading of the document that he seemed to feel is a mess that won't pass legal muster.
Getting right into it, he began with, "This is a bizarre document, and I think it reflects the weakness of Trump's position."
"Actually, let me explain why," he continued. "If you took a seminar on appellate advocacy, the first thing they tell you is you have to focus in appellate court, at any level, on the two, three — sometimes four will be pushing it — key issues, the ones that you think are the weak spots in the decision you're challenging. And that's on steroids when you go up to the Supreme Court of the United States and file a petition for writ of certiorari."
"Here, what Trump did on page — on the inside cover," he elaborated, while holding up a marked-up copy of the filing. "You're required to put the question presented. The question presented here in this blunderbuss, did the Supreme Court of Colorado error in ordering President Trump excluded from the 2024 presidential primary ballot?"
"He is throwing stuff up at the wall, or throwing stuff up in a zoo cage, and seeing what would stick. So what this reflects, I think, is three things — the third of which is the most important."
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"The first is, I don't know that he has real appellate advocates here of the sort that, if I were a former president and a billionaire, I would want to have. I mean, Mark Meadows the other day hired one of the best advocates ever to appear before the Supreme Court, Paul Clement, a former solicitor general in the Bush administration. Trump can't do that because people don't want to work for him," he explained. "The second is, I think this question reflects, you know, channeling Trump's narcissism, 'Oh, poor me. I was screwed by many which ways.'"
"The third reason, I think, is the fundamental weakness of his position," Conway added. "The fifth point in this brief, point five, Roman numeral five, is he didn't engage in insurrection. It is not number one. The reason is, it's because his arguments are very, very weak. If you look at the question in terms of president Trump should be removed from the ballot, it's kind of a shocking notion to those of us who haven't lived, until now, in an era where public officials engage in insurrection. But it was familiar to the people who enacted the 14th amendment."
"When you go through the issues one by one by one, the way lawyers are supposed to, his case looks terrible," he concluded.