George Conway moves from Twitter to MSNBC: I’m ‘horrified’ and ‘appalled’

“I don’t think I could have imagined a president — any president — engaging in this sort of conduct,” Conway said.

Longtime Republican lawyer George Conway, husband of White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, joined MSNBC's live coverage of Wednesday's impeachment hearings.Read moreMSNBC / File

Published Nov. 13, 2019, 10:51 a.m. ET

George Conway has moved from Twitter to cable news.

Conway, a longtime Republican lawyer and the husband of White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, was a surprise addition to MSNBC’s live coverage of Wednesday’s public impeachment hearings. But the move to TV certainty didn’t dull Conway’s sharp critiques of the president, or his call to fellow Republicans to stop defending Trump’s push for an Ukrainian investigation into former vice president Joe Biden and Biden’s son.

“He was abusing the power of the presidency in its most unchecked area — foreign affairs — to advance his own personal interests, as opposed to the country’s,” Conway said prior to the start of Wednesday’s hearings. “This is about putting the country, the law, truth above partisanship.”

Conway has been an outspoken critic of Trump since March 2017, when he reportedly turned down a job in the administration in part due to the firing of former FBI director James Comey. Neither Conway nor his wife, a South Jersey native, have discussed their disagreements about Trump publicly, though Kellyanne Conway recently berated a Washington Examiner reporter for suggesting issues with their marriage.

Along with a Twitter account that offers a nearly daily critique of Trump’s presidency, George Conway wrote an 11,000-word op-ed for The Atlantic in which he outlined why he thinks Trump’s narcissism makes him unfit for office. He’s also offered harsh words for fellow Republicans, saying they remain blindly loyal to Trump to the detriment of the country.

“I’m horrified. I’m appalled. If you had told me three years ago that it would come to this, I wouldn’t have believed it,” Conway said on MSNBC. “If Barack Obama had done these things, they’d be out for blood. And they’d be right.”

So what caused Conway to make his first TV appearance since Trump’s election?

“It’s the moment,” Conway told host Nicolle Wallace. “I don’t frankly want to be on TV. I just don’t get why people don’t see this, or are refusing to see this. It’s appalling to me.”

» WATCH LIVE: Video of Wednesday’s public impeachment hearing

An MSNBC spokesperson did not rule out future appearances by Conway, but for now he is only scheduled to offer analysis of Wednesday’s impeachment hearings.