The spicy Twitter feed of Kellyanne Conway’s husband has gotten noticed in the Oval Office. But friends say the real target of his ire isn’t Donald Trump.
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Over the past year, however, since Trump fired FBI Director James Comey and special counsel Robert Mueller was appointed by the Justice Department, George Conway has become a man in turmoil. A serious, conservative attorney who believes in the rule of law, he has been torn, people who know him say, between the loyalty he feels toward his wife and an assault on his profession and his ideals that he did not anticipate when he cheered on election night—delivered by her boss.
During that period, he has walked away from a powerful job running the Justice Department’s civil division, where he would have served as one of the administration’s top lawyers. And he has become a Twitter phenom—tweeting and retweeting critiques of the president and support for the Mueller probe that his wife’s employer calls a “witch hunt.” Many in the White House have noticed, including Kellyanne and, according to multiple administration officials, the president himself.
The pushback coming from inside the house of Trump’s lead cable-news defender has become one of Washington’s favorite family dramas. In “Conway versus Conway,” George attacks the president, or seems to defend the Mueller probe, while Kellyanne puts her own credibility on the line to defend Trump, who has escalated his verbal assaults on the Russia inquiry and this week even demanded an investigation of the investigation.
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Asked to explain his public feud with his wife’s boss, Conway declined to comment or elaborate on his tweets. “If I wanted to say anything publicly,” he said in a direct message on Twitter, “I would just say it.”
But friends and professional acquaintances say Conway’s tweets are just the tip of an iceberg of frustration with Trump that has only grown over the past year. While Conway has always been known as a contrarian, however, some friends have been surprised and disappointed by the public airing of anti-Trump sentiment from a man who is known to value discretion.
On some occasions, Conway has even gone outside the boundaries of Twitter when he couldn’t contain his apparent grievance any longer.
“Drivel,” he told Reuters in an interview last week, referring to Rudy Giuliani’s assertion that the president cannot be the subject of a subpoena. He has also emailed people who have written things critical of Trump and quietly suggested improvements in their arguments, according to people who have received his unsolicited two cents.
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But in conservative legal circles, his tweets are reverberating in a way that has not much at all to do with his wife. There, George Conway is seen as rebuking the silence of his fellow Federalist Society members—the elite, conservative lawyers who have generally chosen to give Trump a pass on his breaches of long-cherished legal norms and traditions in exchange for the gift of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch.
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The spicy Twitter feed of Kellyanne Conway’s husband has gotten noticed in the Oval Office. But friends say the real target of his ire isn’t Donald Trump. https://t.co/OefZ5fLv79
— POLITICO (@politico) May 24, 2018
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