Former President Donald Trump continues to publicly admit that he was involved in an “illegal” scheme to overthrow the election, Conservative lawyer George Conway said on Saturday.
Trump spoke at length in a two-hour speech at the “Faith and Freedom” conference on Friday about pressure on Mike Pence to reject election votes cast for Joe Biden on January 6, 2021.
“I told Mike, ‘If you do, you can be Thomas Jefferson,'” Trump told the crowd. “And then, after everything went down, one day I looked at him and said, ‘Mike, I hate to say this, but you’re not Thomas Jefferson.’
It was Trump’s first speech since a series of enthralling hearings by the House House committee examining last year’s uprising.
“From a prosecutor’s point of view, let him keep talking,” Conway told host Katie Phang on MSNBC. “He basically still admits that he exerted pressure [former Vice President] Mike Pence for doing something completely illegal. ”
“Someone has to tell him that he has the right to remain silent and anything he says can and will be used against him in a court of law,” added Conway, husband of former Trump senior adviser Kellyanne Conway.
Trump also said he would consider it “very, very serious” to grant pardons to defendants who stormed the Capitol if re-elected. It can be seen as an attempt at “witness tampering” if he now has that power, Conway said.
This is what he “did a few years ago … hung forgiveness on people,” Conway remarked.
Trump also complained in his speech that those arrested after the uprising “were completely destroyed and treated worse than terrorists and murderers”.
He called the violence at the Capitol a “simple protest” that got out of hand, falsely claiming that “most” rioters were charged with nothing more than parading through the Capitol.
Conway also discussed Trump’s “willful blindness” over the illegality of rogue states to overthrow a legitimate presidential election. “He understood, but he did not care,” says Conway.
Watch the full interview here:
