KELLYANNE CROWS: Conway’s Jan. 6 confessions (including advising Trump AGAINST pardons)
The January 6th Committee has now released the transcript of their interview with Kellyanne Conway, who served as an advisor to Donald Trump during his presidency.
Among other revelations in her interview, she shares that she opposed the then-president’s push for pardons for high-profile people, including Steve Bannon and members of Congress.
Conway insists she wasn’t “standing between [Steve Bannon] and [his] pardon,” and that she told both him and Trump that the president could pardon whoever he chose.
She indicates that she was primarily trying to stay out of the process, and suggests that everyone around her — including Trump — wanted her on board for pardoning Bannon, then paints herself as simultaneously somewhat opposed to the plan, and determined not to have input.
She denies having any idea that Trump had considered pardoning members of Congress for their roles in January 6th and the surrounding election scheming, though she also claims that she advised Trump against pardons for people who had power in their own right, saying she advised him to only use them for people who “can’t pay for counsel [or] can’t get anybody to pay attention to their case,” and those who had already “paid their debt to society.”
Her responses regarding pardons are somewhat contradictory throughout, as she also denies knowing that Trump was considering pardons for the January 6th defendants, even as she admits that she had a conversation with him about who should be granted pardons.
She also says that Trump offered her a pardon in the same conversation. From her interview:
Q: Going back to pardons more generally, did you ever hear about potential pardons for members of Congress, again, in this December 2020-January 2021 timeframe?
A: Not specific names, no.
Q: Just that — were there some — did you come to understand that there was some consideration for members, even if you didn’t know who they were?
A: I did not. Maybe that was reported in the press. I did not, sir.
Even here, her initial response, “not specific names,” seems to hint that she knew members of Congress were on the potential pardon list, before she walks it back in the next response, insisting she had no idea pardons were on the table at all.
As for Bannon, she says that Trump asked her to call him, because “everyone else” was on board with a pardon for the podcaster, “even Ivanka.”
Conway claims she refused to call, citing Bannon’s history of “leaking,” and his reported reference to his time in the White House as “being a nursemaid to a 71-year-old.”
Later, though, someone else — she can’t quite recall who — contacted her again on Trump’s behalf, urging her to contact Bannon, and when she didn’t, he contacted her instead.
She claims that he insisted he didn’t want a pardon, and that he invited her on his podcast instead, to which she remembers answering, “I didn’t know you had one.”
When pressed about who Trump considered pardoning at the end of his reign, she describes having a meal with him on December 22, 2000, with him, and thinking he was offering her a soda or dinner roll, rather than a protection against future indictments.
“[H]e just asked me if I — we were talking about pardons, and that’s what I was saying, you know, you do best when you pardon these forgotten men, forgotten women. It’s an awesome power. And he said, would you like one? And I joke in my book that I literally thought he meant a Diet Coke or a dinner roll, because he had both and I had neither.”
Contradictorily, she maintains that she and Trump only discussed pardons in the context of presidential power, and that she advised him to grant them only to the downtrodden, not to the powerful:
[T]he only conversations I would have had with President Trump about pardons was about the Presidential pardon power. And I told him what I still feel to be true, that I thought…his pardons worked best when they were for people who really don’t have a voice…”
At the same time, she says she knew he had a list of “requests that fit that bill,” and “some that didn’t fit that bill.”
Throughout, Conway works hard to distance herself from decisions about any specific pardon, or even category of pardons — but in between, these small amounts of information that slip through consistently indicate she actually opposed pardons for Bannon, and a broad category of other powerful Trump associates.
