Kellyanne Conway meets with prosecutors in Trump’s New York case: The longtime Donald Trump adviser was interviewed, reportedly about the hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels.
Donald Trump Has a New Problem?
Kellyanne Conway was one of the major figures of the Trump White House.
A longtime Republican pollster who up to that point had been a public Donald Trump skeptic, Conway joined the Trump campaign as campaign manager relatively late in the 2016 race and was a top White House aide until the fall of 2020.
Conway frequently made news for controversial statements about “alternative facts” and the nonexistent Bowling Green Massacre, and the press couldn’t get enough of the dynamic in which she and her husband, veteran Republican lawyer George Conway, found themselves on opposite sides of the Trump divide; the two are still married but no longer living together, Conway said in interviews when he book was published.
Even her daughter Claudia emerged as a TikTok star, and Conway was memorably portrayed on “Saturday Night Live” by Kate McKinnon.
After leaving the White House, Conway wrote a book, in which she admitted that Trump lost the 2020 election, leading to a rebuke from her former boss.
She does not appear to have any involvement with Trump’s 2024 presidential bid.
And now, such a reunion is even less likely, amid the news that Conway met with prosecutors in New York who are investigating Trump’s financial past, in a Manhattan District Attorney probe that appears focused on Trump’s alleged hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels.
Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal attorney who had a highly publicized break with the then-president, had said in his 2020 book that Conway had known about the payment at the time.
“I called Trump to confirm that the transaction was completed, and the documentation all in place, but he didn’t take my call — obviously a very bad sign, in hindsight,” Cohen wrote in the book, “Disloyal.” He added that Conway had “called and said she’d pass along the good news.”
Conway’s name has not surfaced in the January 6 and Mar-a-Lago documents investigations, mostly because she had left the White House before the end of Trump’s term.
The former White House aide had written a New York Times op-ed in January which was largely complimentary of Donald Trump but admitted that the legal cases against him and other factors could prevent a White House return.
“The case against Trump 2024 rests in some combination of fatigue with self-inflicted sabotage, fear that he cannot outrun the mountain of legal woes, the call to move on, a feeling that he is to blame for underwhelming Republican candidates in 2022 and the perception that other Republicans are less to blame for 2022 and have more recent records as conservative reformers,” Conway wrote in the Times.
Conway joins a list of witnesses in the case that has included Cohen himself, as well as members of the Trump Organization, Daniels’ former attorney Keith Davidson, and former National Enquirer executives David Pecker and Dylan Howard. Daniels herself has not testified yet, per the report.
Conway does not appear to have testified before the grand jury, but rather met with prosecutors.
Recent developments indicate, the Times said, that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is “nearing a decision on whether to seek an indictment of the former president.” The report also said that a prosecution in New York would likely involve accusations that Trump falsified business records in connection with the Daniels payment.
The Manhattan District Attorney’s office, in early 2022, had appeared to conclude that it could not charge Donald Trump with a crime, leading to the departures of two veteran prosecutors who had been working on the case; one of them wrote a book about the experience that was published last month.
But after the office successfully prosecuted the Trump Organization last year, the case was revived, with Bragg empaneling a grand jury.
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Expertise and Experience: Stephen Silver is a Senior Editor for 19FortyFive. He is an award-winning journalist, essayist and film critic, who is also a contributor to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Broad Street Review, and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenSilver.
