George Conway—after being thoroughly besmirched by his association with the scandalous (sex and money) Lincoln Project—is back. Teamed up with J. Michael Luttig and Barbara Comstock, he is predicting the end of life as we know it if Donald Trump is re-elected president.
“Recent reporting about plans for a second Trump presidency are frightening,” they write. These people are easily frightened.
Donald Trump, they tell us, “would stock his administration with partisan loyalists committed to fast-tracking his agenda and sidestepping—if not circumventing altogether—existing laws and long-established legal norms.”
STOP THE PRESS: Trump would hire loyalists and people who believed in his agenda!
As opposed to … what? Hiring people who disagreed with his agenda?
Are Conway and his cronies suggesting that Democrats, and especially Biden, hire people opposed to what they want to accomplish? Is that why President Kennedy hired his brother as attorney general?
Biden dismissed Trump-era appointees en masse when he took office, including Sharon Fast Gustafson, the general counsel of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Roger Severino of the Council of the Administrative Conference of the United States, and Peter Robb, general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board (a position never before vacated by the president in U.S. history).
The Conway folk write that Trump’s nefarious agenda includes “appointing to high public office political appointees to rubber-stamp his plans to investigate and exact retribution against his political opponents.”
Yet it is Joe Biden who has labeled “MAGA Republicans” a threat to American democracy and has accused Trump of enabling domestic terrorism. It is the Biden administration that has investigated parents at school boards and hired a disinformation czar that called Hunter Biden’s laptop a “Trump campaign product.” And it is the FBI, under the Biden administration, that has ramped up its investigations of Trump supporters and created a new category label for domestic extremism—which has been applied almost exclusively to Trump supporters.
In October 2022, the FBI created a label it calls “AGAAVE-Other,” something it defines as “domestic violent extremists who cite anti-government or anti-authority motivations for violence or criminal activity not otherwise defined, such as individuals motivated by a desire to commit violence against those with a real or perceived association with a specific political party or faction of a specific political party.” As Newsweek reports, “Government insiders acknowledge that it applies to political violence ascribed to the former president’s supporters.”
Indeed, in the same report, Newsweek shares that in 2021, of the 1,446 investigations that led to arrests, 1,146 (79 percent, for those interested) were January 6 protesters. And of the investigations the FBI is currently pursuing, almost two-thirds are focused on Trump supporters and others suspected of violating “anti-riot” laws.
After all, how can the government not be expected to crack down on “dangerous people” like concerned parents at school board meetings, who—according to Merrick Garland—are behind a “disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence.” Since October 2020, the FBI has instructed agents to “flag all assessments and investigations into potentially criminal threats, harassment and intimidation of educators with a ‘threat tag.’”
Those actions don’t seem to bother Conway et al one bit.
And who’s sidestepping the law now?
In August 2021, the Biden administration unilaterally extended the Centers for Disease Control’s pandemic-related eviction moratorium, preventing landlords from evicting tenants who were delinquent in their payments. This came after Biden admitted that “the bulk of the constitutional scholars say it’s not likely to pass constitutional muster.”
In August 2022, the Biden administration unilaterally decided to “forgive” up to $10,000 in federal student loan debt for individuals making less than $125,000 annually or households making less than $250,000. This came after Nancy Pelosi, then Democratic Speaker of the House, said that the president “does not have [the] power” of debt forgiveness and that it “has to be an act of Congress.”
What do Conway and his cronies think of that?
“We are thankful,” the Conway cabal writes, “that there were lawyers in the Trump administration who opted to resign or be fired rather than advance his flagrantly unconstitutional schemes. They should be lauded.”
But Conway et al are not lauding Gary Shapley, the IRS whistleblower who was removed from the Hunter Biden case after speaking out. Shapley said, “Based on my experience, if this was a small-business owner or any other non-connected individual, they would have been charged with felony counts.”
Please: these Conway people are accusing Trump of doing or planning to do exactly what the Biden administration has actually been doing already.
“Lock her up” was one of the rallying cries of the first Trump campaign. No one took it seriously. It was just a way of expressing dismay that someone as disgraceful and dishonest as Hillary Clinton (wife of the disgraceful and dishonest Bill Clinton) was running for president and might actually be elected.
Well, it’s not quite correct to say, “No one took it seriously.” Extremist Democrats took it absolutely seriously and are now busily engaged in trying to lock up Donald Trump.
Conway et al are right about one thing: “American democracy, the Constitution and the rule of law” are indeed “increasingly in peril.”
Vote early and often—but don’t tell George Conway.
Daniel Oliver is Chairman of the Board of the Education and Research Institute and a Director of Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy in San Francisco. In addition to serving as Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission under President Reagan, he was Executive Editor and subsequently Chairman of the Board of William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review.
Email Daniel Oliver at Daniel.Oliver@TheCandidAmerican.com.