Until 2018, Boston native George Conway was a prominent figure in the Republican Party. And for many years, he was quite active in the right-wing legal group the Federalist Society.
But the conservative attorney’s vehement disdain for President Donald Trump and the MAGA movement inspired him to leave the GOP and become an independent in 2018, and these days, Conway is an unlikely ally of Democrats.
Five months into Trump’s second presidency, Conway offered legal analysis of the Trump-era U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) during a late June appearance on The Bulwark’s vodcast. And he lamented that there is little accountability for the Trump Administration because his loyalists now dominate DOJ.
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Conway told fellow Never Trump conservative Jonathan V. Last — who was filling in for the vodcast’s usual host, Sarah Longwell — “The problem is: Who’s going to prosecute? He’s in charge…. The criminals are in charge.”
The attorney noted that in some cases, the U.S. Supreme Court has “shown some skepticism and annoyance at the government.”
Conway, however, was highly critical of a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision that halted a lower federal court ruling that blocked the Trump Administration from deporting non-citizens to third countries they aren’t originally from without 15 days’ notice. Critics of the High Court’s ruling believe, for example, that if Venezuelans are deported from the U.S., they shouldn’t be deported to any country other than Venezuela — not El Salvador, not Libya, not the Sudan.
Conway told Last, “It’s kind of incongruous for the Supreme Court to have said very clearly, in these prior deportation cases, that people are entitled to adequate notice and the ability to contest removal — and then, not say that they are entitled to contest where they’re being removed to when that often is just as important as the removal itself. Because these people may be being sent — and the government seems to be making a point of sending them — to places where they will be unsafe. And that’s a very disturbing development.”
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