George Conway, the husband of White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, on Monday replied to a tweet from President Trump, telling the president he thinks the case that Trump violated campaign finance law “looks like a pretty good case.”
Replying to a tweet quoting Fox News from the president that said there was no “smocking [sic] gun tying the Trump campaign to Russia,” Conway said that campaign finance violations were found by “professional line prosectors” and added that it was done by a “Republican-controlled” Justice Department.
{mosads}”No, the criminal campaign-finance violations were found by professional line prosecutors in a Republican-controlled United States Department of Justice,” Conway, a frequent critic of the president, wrote on Twitter. “It looks like a pretty good case. Kudos to them.”
Federal prosecutors in New York on Friday said that they had found Trump directed his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, to violate campaign finance law by using campaign funds to pay off two women who claimed to have had affairs with Trump.
Cohen had previously said Trump told him to pay the women off, breaking campaign finance law, but his lawyer Lanny Davis, who is an opinion contributor to The Hill, had said there might be no evidence of Trump’s involvement beyond Cohen’s testimony.
Conway was responding to a tweet that Trump wrote earlier Monday, in which he wrote that Democrats had been unable to find clear evidence that his 2016 presidential campaign colluded with Russia, arguing that this demonstrated his innocence.
The president went on to say that the money spent to pay off the women was a “private transaction” and not a “campaign contribution.”
“‘Democrats can’t find a Smocking Gun tying the Trump campaign to Russia after James Comey’s testimony. No Smocking Gun…No Collusion.’ @Fox News,” Trump wrote.
“That’s because there was NO COLLUSION,” he said. “So now the Dems go to a simple private transaction, wrongly call it a campaign contribution.”
In his initial response to Trump, Conway seemed to mock the president’s apparent misspelling of “smoking gun.”
Conway later deleted the original tweet.
Special counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, as well as Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, has indicted numerous people and several companies, but none yet with direct connections to collusion between the campaign and Russia.
He is reportedly expected to make his final report soon, which Democrats anticipate could be a key step toward possibly impeaching the president.