‘I just hate corrupt politicians’: George Conway on his political evolution as he enters Democratic House primary

How does a man who worked behind the scenes to lay the groundwork for the impeachment of Bill Clinton and cried tears of joy on the night Donald Trump was elected president for the first time morph into a Democrat with hopes of helping orchestrate what would be Trump’s third impeachment?

If that man is George Conway, the answer appears to be rather easy.

“Everything is at stake — democracy is at stake, the rule of law is at stake, constitutional government is at stake. And it's no longer good enough for me to sit and lob things in from the spectator seats,” Conway told The Independent.

The self-described “recovering lawyer,” a Republican for most of life, who was once married to one of Trump’s closest first-term advisers, has thrown his hat into the ring for the House seat in New York’s 12th district that will be left open by the retirement of Rep. Jerry Nadler after this Congress.

Conway, 61, filed to run in the solidly Democratic district last month, shortly after he leased an apartment in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, where he currently lives with his nearly four-year-old corgi, Clyde.

He formally announced his campaign Tuesday — the anniversary of the January 6 attack on the Capitol — with a video message pledging to “not be an ordinary Member of Congress” because this is “no ordinary time.”

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“We need a majority in a Democratic Congress who is that is absolutely laser focused on protecting and saving our democracy and our Constitution,” Conway said, because “it's going to hard to see anything really good and lasting change in terms of how to help people's lives happen until this disease of Trumpism is gone.”

The ex-corporate litigator is now the 10th person running for the seat, joining a field that includes candidates half his age, including anti-gun activist Cameron Kassky, lawyer, writer and Kennedy family scion Jack Schossberg, 26-year-old Democratic organizer Liam Elkind, plus several members of the New York State assembly.

The fact that the 12th Congressional District seat won’t have an incumbent running is largely a function of the ongoing fallout from former president Joe Biden’s disastrous decision to run for re-election at age 80 before having to exit the race after his somnolent, rambling and often incoherent June 2024 debate performance against Trump.

Incumbent Jerrold Nadler, who at 78 had been in the House since 1992 and had never faced a serious re-election challenge, announced his retirement last year amid calls for Democrats to bring in younger voices to push back against Trump.

Conway, born just months before the assassination of Schlossberg’s grandfather — President John F. Kennedy — will be eligible to collect Social Security in September. While he’s new to electoral politics as a candidate, he’s not the sort of fresh face for which activists were clamoring after Trump’s re-election romp last year.

In an interview with The Independent ahead of his campaign’s launch, Conway said the dire circumstances of current American politics have compelled him to get off the sidelines after years of being a thorn in Trump’s side, first as a high-profile critic, then as a founder of the Lincoln Project anti-Trump PAC, then as a megadonor who dropped eye-watering sums of his own cash into former vice president Kamala Harris campaign and his own PAC.

He described the country as being saddled with a “criminal president” — a fact given Trump’s 2024 conviction in New York Supreme Court — who “is committing more crimes each as we speak” while simultaneously defying the law and believing he is the law.

Conway also decried the way Trump is running the U.S. government “like a mob operation … for his own personal benefit” since he returned to the White House nearly a year ago, characterizing it as “government of the boss, by the boss and for the boss, instead of government of the people, for the people and by the people.”

Conway, a Yale University Law School graduate who argued — and won — a 2010 securities law case in front of the Supreme Court, told The Independent he never planned on running for office and thought people who chose to do so were “f**king crazy” before a conversation with his now girlfriend, a psychologist, who asked them during one of their first meetings why he never considered it despite his years of high-profile activism against the president.

He said he received similar urging from another longtime friend, the writer and MSNOW political contributor Molly Jong-Fast, who he quipped was now “responsible for inflicting me upon the body politic.”

But the more Conway thought about it, he said he came to see the 12th District as the right place to make his first run for office.

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Although he has spent most of the Trump era living in Washington, D.C. and a nearby suburb, Bethesda, Maryland, he explained how he spent most of his adult life living and working in the place he hopes to represent in Congress - New York City.

In addition to the three decades working in the district at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen and Katz — a white-shoe law firm headquartered on Park Avenue and later on West 52nd Street — Conway spent years living at 845 United Nations Plaza, better known as Trump World Tower.

He also noted that all four of his children were born in New York City — with two of them being born at NYU Langone hospital, which is also firmly within the 12th District.

“It left an indelible mark on me, and left an overwhelming pride at having lived there and living there once again,” he said.

Asked how he’d respond to claims that his recent move back to the city for the purpose of his campaign makes him a carpetbagger, Conway quipped that he may well have been “living, working, paying taxes and voting” in the 12th Congressional District “before some of these people running were even born.”

He also stressed that the threat Trump poses requires Democrats to elect lawmakers to Congress who can fight back effectively in favor of the rule of law against what he called “end-stage Trumpism” — and work to prevent a resurgence of it in the future.

Conway explained that eliminating “Trumpism” requires two things. The first, he said, is “accountability” in the form of impeachment — not just for Trump but for “his cronies, his Cabinet officials, [and] all of these people who are violating laws and basically pillaging the public fisc and profiting and extorting money from law firms and companies and indicting people who they consider political enemies.”

“There have to be investigations, hard-nosed investigations by a Democratic Congress, and impeachment for people who are violating their oaths of office each and every day,” he said.

He said the second step would be “passing legislation within the four corners of the Constitution, that will help protect this from ever happening again.”

“It requires good lawyering on the House Judiciary Committee for investigating, on the House Oversight Committee for investigating and for impeachment, and then to pass these laws that make sure things don't happen again as they have,” he said.

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He added that he sees himself as a “special-teams player” who could help with those things — and then leave Congress when the job is done.

“I'm not going to be like other people who want to live their lives in Congress or the state legislature. I can't do that, and I won't do that,” he said.

Conway’s return to New York and his late-in-life launch of a political career marks the latest turn in what has been a tumultuous decade for the former corporate litigator.

At this time 10 years ago, he was living in New Jersey with his then-wife, Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway, their four children — Claudia and George Jr., Charlotte, and Vanessa — and a pair of corgis, Bonnie and Skipper.

But that was before the summer 2016 Trump campaign shakeup that saw Kellyanne elevated to manage the last months of Trump’s madcap, misfit campaign against Hilary Clinton that ended with him claiming the presidency — and George being photographed on election night overwhelmed with pride as his wife became the first woman to ever manage a winning presidential campaign.

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The Conways moved to Washington, where Kellyanne joined the Trump White House and George, who’d given up his lucrative law firm partnership, was set to be nominated as the Assistant Attorney General in the Department of Justice Civil Division.

She became one of Trump’s most vociferous — and infamous — defenders over the next three years, often running afoul of federal ethics laws and clashing with reporters during frequent combative exchanges in the White House driveway following innumerable appearances on Fox News and other Trump-aligned channels.

But George stayed out of the administration after becoming unsettled by Trump’s attacks on the department where he’d been preparing to serve — particularly after the president fired then-FBI director James Comey.

He also told The Independent in a 2024 interview that he’d been deeply disturbed by an encounter he and Kellyanne had with Trump at then-treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin’s 2017 wedding, where the president had gone on what Conway described at the time as a “crazy nonsensical rant” about then-attorney general Jeff Sessions, who’d recently recused himself from the department’s probe into alleged ties between the Trump 2016 campaign and the Russian government.

Around the same time, George began tweeting, which given his connection to the administration, began attracting attention from reporters — and from Trump himself, who by March 2019 was attacking his close adviser’s spouse in his own tweets as a "stone cold LOSER & husband from hell."

His political commentary shifted into a higher gear in July 2019 when The Washington Post published an op-ed he wrote slamming Trump as “racist” after the president called for a quartet of non-white Democratic congresswomen to “go back” to the “countries” they “originally came from.” It grew from there as his criticism and political activism against Trump became his new calling card.

Conway joined with anti-Trump GOP operatives Rick Wilson, Steve Schmidt and Stuart Stevens to form The Lincoln Project, the anti-Trump Super PAC that became a massive thorn in Trump’s side during his failed 2020 election bid with viral ads that mocked him in highly personal terms. Wilson, an infamous ad-maker who helmed some of the GOP’s most devastating TV spots over decades before leaving the party over Trump, told The Independent in a phone interview that Conway “has a chance to play a role … that would be very valuable” in the fight against Trumpism if elected.

Democrats, he said, “want people that are going to be effective in the fight, and that fight is now, at this moment, very much against Donald Trump and Trumpism and Trump's enablers.”

“I think George has a chance to play a role there that would be very valuable in a contest like this … Democrats understand right now that Congress isn't going to be … about like large, complicated policy bills … we’re a long way from that world,” he said.

“George will go in there and go, he'll kick the shit out of people, which is kind of what you want right now. You want somebody who's going to be, you know, going in there and being an aggressive advocate against Trump and Trumpism.”

As Trump’s first term rolled on into the Covid pandemic and through the 2020 election, George’s increasingly higher profile as an anti-Trump activist continued to cause tensions with Kellyanne, who later wrote that George had been “cheating by tweeting” during Trump’s first term.

In August 2020, George announced that he was leaving the Lincoln Project to focus on his family. Kellyanne left the White House that same month.

But his tweeting — and his anti-Trump advocacy continued, and the Conways announced they would divorce in March 2023 after more than two decades of marriage. Asked to weigh in on her ex-husband’s entry into electoral politics, Kellyanne Conway declined to comment in a text message to The Independent.

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His history as a Republican who attacked Clinton and helped in the effort to impeach him — plus Conway’s support for Trump during the 2016 campaign his then-wife managed — could serve as fodder for Conway’s Democratic primary opponents who want to cast him as a Johnny-come-lately to the party and question whether he can be trusted.

But liberal journalist Joe Conason, whose 2000 book The Hunting of the President chronicled Conway’s anti-Clinton legal work, told The Independent he did not think George’s politics were ever “as far-right” as his ex-wife’s.

“I think he was conservative on some issues, certainly economic issues, for sure, and some legal issues. I don't think he was ever a, you know, imperial presidency type of authoritarian character at all,” he said.

Conason also said Conway and many of the anti-Clinton types he got to know “now see their hostility towards the Clintons is somewhat quaint” given Trump’s conduct over the last decade.

For his part, Conway said his work against Clinton — much of which took place before some of his primary opponents were even born — wasn’t a function of sheer partisanship as much as it was a passion for the rule of law that has also informed his anti-Trump activism four decades later.

He told The Independent he would welcome questions over his Clinton-era work because it would demonstrate his consistency — not his partisanship.

“My position on presidential immunity and the responsibilities of a president, that a president is not a king, and that a president is subject to the laws just like everybody else, remains the same as it was in 1998, and my position on abusing women remains exactly the same,” he said before pointing out how he’d also helped writer E. Jean Carroll find counsel for a pair of defamation and sexual abuse lawsuits against Trump that have resulted in juries awarding her tens of millions in damages from the president.

Conway noted that he’d commented publicly about the Carroll case after the writer accused Trump of raping her in a Bergdorf-Goodman department store dressing room decades ago by penning a June 2019 Washington Post op-ed calling out the GOP for attacking Carroll years after they venerated a group of women who’d similarly accused Clinton of sexual misconduct.

“I put it to Republicans, if you are all upset about Juanita Broderick and Paula Jones and Kathleen Wiley, then you ought to be really upset about this, because she was [allegedly assaulted] in a department store, and there are witnesses who she talked to immediately after, who confirmed that's what happened,” he said.

“For presidents who abuse power and who abuse women, I think it's wrong either way. That's where I am. I just hate corrupt politicians, period. Full stop.”