Donald Trump will name top White House adviser Kellyanne Conway’s husband, George, to lead the Justice Department’s civil division, the Wall Street Journal reports. In that capacity, if confirmed by the Senate, he’ll supervise the DOJ’s defense of the Trump administration’s ban on travel from several majority-Muslim countries—the second iteration of which was blocked by a judge in Hawaii this week.
George Conway, a Yale Law School graduate, has worked for the white-shoe law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz since 1988. He also worked pro bono for Paula Jones, the Bill Clinton sexual harassment accuser whose case triggered the revelation of the president’s affair with Monica Lewinsky. In his capacity representing Jones, as Mother Jones pointed out in November, Conway helped win a Supreme Court case allowing Jones’ lawsuit against Clinton to proceed while he was in office—a precedent that could inconvenience frequent litigation defendant Donald Trump.
According to his company bio, Conway also successfully argued a case “in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 does not apply extraterritorially to claims of so-called ‘foreign-cubed’ plaintiffs,” so there’s that too.
The DOJ’s civil division, to be clear, is different than its civil rights division, which under the Trump administration is expected to be run by a sentient pile of KKK hoods.
