George Conway Blown Away by Trump Not Ruling Out Clemency for Child Sex Trafficker: ‘Insane’
Conservative attorney George Conway appeared gobsmacked after President Donald Trump declined to rule out granting a pardon or other clemency to Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving 20 years in federal prison for child sex trafficking.
Maxwell, who was convicted in 2021, committed the crimes in question when she was an associate of another child sex trafficker, Jeffrey Epstein, who died in prison in 2019. Epstein is back in the news after the Trump administration declined to release the much-anticipated files relating to the case, which Trump supporters believe implicate rich and powerful figures in wrongdoing. That decision has prompted anger in some MAGA circles, though prominent right-wing media outlets have drastically toned down their Epstein coverage after Trump, a former friend of Epstein, made it clear he wants the story to go away.
The president did himself no favors in that regard on Friday, when a reporter asked if clemency is on the table for Maxwell. “I’m allowed to do it,” he said.
Later that evening, Conway appeared on CNN’s The Lead, where Jake Tapper asked Conway about Trump not releasing the files despite suggesting he may do so. Several top administration officials had also teased damaging information in the documents.
“The Trump administration could release thousands of Epstein files right now if they wanted to,” Tapper said. “They don’t have to go to get a judge’s permission for grand jury testimony, which probably wouldn’t have anything in it anyway. There’s thousands of pages. Now, we should understand, a lot of it’s hearsay. Probably some of it’s false. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the people named are guilty, but they could do that.”
“Right, and they don’t,” Conway replied. “And it’s kind of odd. And it’s also very odd that they’re lying about whether or not they told Donald Trump about it, or he’s lying about that. I mean, can you imagine being the attorney general or the deputy attorney general and not telling Trump he was in those files?”
“Of course they told him!” Tapper said.
Conway added that it was “ridiculously unusual” for Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who was Trump’s former criminal lawyer, to be the one to interview Maxwell, as he had done this week for a total of nine hours.
“No, you’d send a line prosecutor,” Tapper noted.
“Right,” Conway said. “Like the woman they fired. Maurene Comey.”
This month, Attorney General Pam Bondi fired Comey, who worked as a prosecutor on the Maxwell and Epstein cases.
Tapper then asked Conway to speculate what Blanche and Maxwell discussed. Conway called the idea of granting Maxwell clemency “insane.”
“I don’t know what the play is here,” the lawyer conceded. “If the play is to give her some kind of clemency, I mean, it’s gonna stink to high heaven. I mean, she is a sexual predator. She was found guilty of doing these things. She [was] found guilty of, she would take the passports away from these girls, who they dragged to Epstein island. She did all of this stuff. She’s neck deep, way in. And so the notion that they would give her clemency is just insane. But then what would she say? What could she possibly say that would be believable? And, you know, the justice department trashed on her credibility back when they prosecuted her. They said that she couldn’t be trusted under oath.”
Watch above via CNN.
