George Conway, a conservative attorney and prominent critic of former President Trump, called the news that former President Trump was indicted in a probe into his handling of classified documents “absolutely historic.”
“It’s absolutely historic. I mean, this is probably the most significant politically, most significant historically, most historically important criminal case since the Aaron Burr case at the beginning of the 19th century, when he was tried for treason,” Conway said Thursday on CNN.
“It is stunning to see. It is breathtaking to see,” he continued. “But it’s not surprising at all.”
Trump, who is running for president again in 2024, announced Thursday that his legal team had been told he was indicted and summoned to appear in federal court in Miami on Tuesday.
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One of Trump’s attorneys confirmed the indictment during a late Thursday appearance on CNN. Trump said in his announcement that it was “a DARK DAY for the United States of America.”
“Donald Trump is going to argue that he was mistreated and he is being singled out and he’s being abused, but … he’s gotten the benefit of the doubt,” Conway said Thursday.
He posed the hypothetical during a CNN roundtable, saying if “any of us” had “been a government official in the White House during the Trump administration, and we took this volume of documents home, and we jerked around the National Archives and Records Administration for a year-and-a-half-plus, and then forced the government to get to a search warrant.”
In that case, he said, “it wouldn’t have taken a year and a half for them to get that search warrant. They would have been knocking — the FBI would have been at our doors any, like, within months.”
Conway called it “shocking” that the affidavit behind the search warrant executed by the FBI at Mar-a-Lago — where classified documents were recovered — last summer indicated “that they had such a powerful case already.”
“So the fact of the matter is he could have been indicted months ago,” he said. “And, again, if it was one of us, he would have been indicted months ago.”
“He is — he has gotten special treatment in his favor. And this is not a criticism of the Justice Department,” Conway added. “It’s a statement of fact that the Justice Department has to be extra careful and make sure that it has all its ducks in a row before bringing charges against the former president, presidential candidate.”