Conway v. Conway: Top Trump advisor and her husband are expressing radically different views on the Mueller report — and what it means for the president

GOP strategist Kellyanne Conway and her husband, attorney George Conway, have radically different views when it comes to the merits of Donald Trump’s presidency. Both are right-wing Republicans, but while Kellyanne Conway is one of Trump’s most strident cheerleaders, her husband has often been a blistering critic. And true to form, the two of them have had very different reactions to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s final report on his Russia investigation.

Although Attorney General William Barr has yet to make the report public, he wrote a letter to Congress summarizing some of its key points—and Mueller, according to Barr, concluded that the evidence did not show a 2016 Trump campaign/Russian government conspiracy. KC has used the report as an excuse to bash Democrats, echoing Trump’s claims that Mueller’s investigation was a partisan witch hunt (never mind the fact that Mueller is a conservative Republican who, in the 2000s, was appointed to head the FBI by President George W. Bush—and that the person who appointed Mueller to head the Russia investigation, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, is also a Republican).

Appearing on Fox News’ “Fox and Friends” on Monday morning, March 25, KC insisted that Democrats “have now spent 22 months wasting their time” and “really do owe America an apology” for the investigation. KC attacked Rep. Adam Schiff (who heads the House Intelligence Committee) and Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez, insisting that Schiff “ought to resign today” and has been “peddling a lie day after day.”

The following day, March 26, the Washington Post published an op-ed written by George Conway, who offered a legal analysis of Mueller’s final report—and he doesn’t share his wife’s view that the investigation was either a “witch hunt” or a waste of time.

Mueller’s probe, GC stresses, “was a counterintelligence investigation as well as a criminal probe. A core objective—the overarching one, really—was to find out exactly what the Russians were doing. Another was to find out whether there were ‘links’ between the Trump campaign and Russia’s activities. As matters turned out, and quite surprisingly, we now know from public sources that there were links aplenty. So who knows what we might learn on these subjects from Mueller’s still-unreleased report?”

GC’s op-ed goes on to say that while Mueller didn’t conclude that the evidence he gathered showed either “collusion” or “obstruction of justice” or that “the president committed a crime,” it “does not exonerate him” either.  GC asserted, “If his report doesn’t exonerate the president, there must be something pretty damning in it about him, even if it might not suffice to prove a crime beyond a reasonable doubt.” And while KC is calling for Schiff to resign, GC wants members of Congress to see Mueller’s report and evaluate the information presented.

The attorney wrote, “Mueller, according to Barr, said he ‘ultimately determined not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment’ regarding obstruction. Reading that statement together with the no-exoneration statement, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that Mueller wrote his report to allow the American people and Congress to decide what to make of the facts. And that is what should—must—happen now.”

GC concluded his op-ed by criticizing Trump’s “response to the Russia investigation,” putting “his personal interests” over “national interests” and being “more concerned about touting his supposedly historic election victory than confronting an attack on our democracy by a hostile foreign power. If the charge were unfitness for office, the verdict would already be in: guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.”