Conservative lawyer George Conway, White House counselor Kellyanne Conway’s husband, characterized the Trump administration as a “shit show in a dumpster fire” in explaining why he withdrew from consideration for a Justice Department post last year.
“I’m watching this thing and you know it’s like, ‘The administration is like a shit show in a dumpster fire,’” Conway told Yahoo News’ “Skullduggery” podcast in an interview released Friday. “And I’m like, ‘I don’t want to do that. I don’t know.'”
Conway said his views of the administration further soured with the firing of former FBI Director James Comey, and the ensuing Russia-related probe by special counsel Robert Mueller.
“I realized, ‘This guy is going to be at war with the Justice Department,'” Conway said. “If I get this door prize, I’m going to be in the middle of a department he’s at war with. Why would anybody want to do this?”
Conway was considered a front-runner to head the Justice Department’s civil division, but he dropped out of consideration in June 2017. Conway said at the time he was “profoundly grateful” to President Trump and then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions for considering him.
Conway has since become a fierce Trump critic, issuing a series of barbed tweets that have received particularly attention since his wife is one of the president’s closest advisers. He also has organized a group of conservative lawyers, Checks and Balances, designed to warn about what he called the Trump administration’s violation of constitutional norms.
Conway said he took particular umbrage with the president’s tweets at Sessions and the Justice Department, saying they “bugged me the most.”
He noted one tweet from September in which Trump chastised Sessions over the indictments of two Republican congressmen before the midterm elections.
“I was appalled. It was appalling,” Conway said. “We’re talking about someone who has sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution and laws of the United States, and to criticize the attorney general for permitting justice to be done without regard to political party is very disturbing.”
Conway told the podcast that he doesn’t believe his wife likes his attacks on the president.
“But I’ve told her, ‘I don’t like the administration, so it’s even,’” he said.
Conway did praise his wife’s work as Trump’s campaign manager in 2016. But Conway said he would “probably move to Australia” if faced with the choice again of supporting Trump or Hillary Clinton in a presidential election.
“My wife did an amazing thing, I mean, she basically got this guy elected,” he said. “And other people like to take credit for it, but she got this guy elected. She steadied that boat. She did it. She went on television, she imposed message discipline on that campaign.”
Trump’s presidential bid, Conway continued, “was in the crapper when she took that campaign over.”
