According to a report in Politico, presidential advisor Kellyanne Conway is being kept off the airwaves and made unavailable to reporters over fears of a screw-up talking about impeachment in the wake of acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney’s floundering attempts to defend Donald Trump.
Despite Conway getting a minor scuffle with a Washington Examiner reporters over her relationship with her outspoken husband, conservative lawyer George Conway, the equally-outspoken Kellyanne has rarely been seen since the Democratic-led House began impeachment hearings on the President.
According to the report, the longtime aide’s disappearance is intentional.
“Two days after House Democrats began their formal impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump, Kellyanne Conway went on national television to assure viewers her boss did nothing wrong in his summer phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Then she went silent,” Politico’s Gabby Orr writes.
Noting that the “indefatigable defender of the Republican leader ever since she took over his campaign in August 2016,” has receded into the background, the report points out that it has not gone unnoticed by other White House insiders.
Related: Kellyanne Conway Lashes Out at Democratic Voters as ‘Racist and Sexist’ at Ohio GOP Dinner
With a Republican close to the White House, admitting, “She’s nowhere to be seen and I think that’s deliberate,” the report suggests Mulvaney’s stunningly bad press conference and equally awful follow-up on Fox News has caused the White House to become more careful about how the president is defended.
“If ever the president’s aides were given a reason to avoid coming to his defense, it likely happened during Mulvaney’s impromptu briefing at the White House last week. Hours after he seemingly confirmed that the White House withheld foreign aid to Ukraine as leverage to get political dirt on Trump’s opponents, Mulvaney was forced to conduct cleanup in a statement,” the reports states. “The episode underscored the risk Trump surrogates face each and every time they publicly defend the president, but it also illuminated how Conway has managed to shield herself from the bipartisan blowback Mulvaney encountered by avoiding the kinds of details that have become fodder for Democrats wielding subpoena power.”
According to a Trump confidante, at this point of the impeachment inquiry, it’s better to remain silent than say the wrong thing and be subpoenaed.
“In times like this, going in front of the media as a Trump surrogate means you can quickly get turned into a pretzel,” the anonymous source confided. “So the best way to deal with these circumstances is to be error-free, or just put your head down.”
According to Orr, Conway’s silence will likely come to the notice of the president soon.
“It’s easy to be a cheerleader when it’s easy, but when you’re the happy warrior and you’re suddenly not on air, it becomes obvious to a lot of folks very quickly,” a former official explained.
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