George Conway on Trump adding Dershowitz, Starr to legal team: ‘Hard to see how either could help’

Attorney George Conway, husband of White House counselor Kellyanne Conway and a frequent critic of President Trump, knocked Trump in an op-ed on Sunday after it was recently revealed that Ken Starr and Alan Dershowitz would be joining his legal defense team for his upcoming impeachment trial in the Senate.

While Conway said he liked Starr, the former independent counsel whose investigation into former President Clinton helped led to his impeachment, and contended that Dershowitz “may be a genius in some ways,” he called the new addition a “legal odd couple” for Trump’s defense team in the piece.

Dershowitz, Conway wrote, is “not necessarily the advocate you want on your side.”

“Judges have told me they find him condescending in manner and tone — not the approach you want before a court consisting of 100 U.S. senators. And he’s wont to make off-the-wall arguments,” Conway continued, adding: “Dershowitz’s recent assertion that the Supreme Court could order the Senate not to conduct an impeachment trial illustrates the point. Not only is that claim indefensible — it’s also ridiculous.”

And when discussing the decision to add Starr to Trump’s defense team in the op-ed, Conway said he couldn’t “comprehend what he’s doing here” either.

“He’s best known as the independent counsel whose investigation led to the impeachment of Clinton. That’s hardly helpful for Trump, because Clinton was a piker compared with Trump,” Conway wrote.

“As if that were not enough, in the Clinton case, Starr argued that Clinton had committed an impeachable offense by blocking witness testimony and documents. Oops,” he continued.

“Any litigator will tell you that adding to your legal team on the eve of trial most likely will not produce better lawyering but, rather, chaos. In that sense, at least, Trump will be getting the representation he deserves,” he added. 

He also took further aim at Trump in the op-ed while breaking down how Trump’s “unimpressive” legal team – which includes Pam Bondi, Robert Ray and Jane Raskin,  White House counsel Pat Cipollone and attorney Jay Sekulow – came to be assembled.

“President Trump, whose businesses and now campaign have left a long trail of unpaid bills behind them, has never discriminated when it comes to stiffing people who work for him. That includes lawyers — which is part of the reason he found the need to make some curious last-minute tweaks to his team,” he wrote.

​“The president has consistently encountered difficulty in hiring good lawyers to defend him. In 2017, after Robert S. Mueller III became special counsel, Trump couldn’t find a high-end law firm that would take him as a client,” he claimed in the opinion piece. “His reputation for nonpayment preceded him: One major Manhattan firm I know had once been forced to eat bills for millions in bond work it once did for Trump. No doubt other members of the legal community knew of other examples.”

“Of course, being cheap wasn’t the only reason Trump struck out among the nation’s legal elite,” Conway continued. “There was the fact that he would be an erratic client who’d never take reasonable direction — direction as in shut up and stop tweeting. Firms also understood that taking on Trump would kill their recruiting efforts: Top law students of varying political stripes who might be willing, even eager, to join a firm that provides pro bono representation to murderers on death row, want nothing to do with Trump.”

The White House did not immediately respond to request for comment from The Hill regarding Conway’s claims.

The sharp criticism by Conway comes a month after the attorney joined other conservatives in launching an anti-Trump political action committee known as The Lincoln Project, which is committed helping defeat Trump in this year’s election.