The Bulwark

A major bombshell from the Donald Trump-era U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) came down on Thursday afternoon, October 16 when hawkish neocon John Bolton — who served as national security adviser during Trump's first administration — was indicted on 18 federal counts for allegedly mishandling classified government documents.

In a video posted by The Bulwark late Friday night, October 17, conservative attorney George Conway offered legal analysis of the Bolton indictment — which, he told host Sarah Longwell (a conservative strategist and fellow Never Trumper), has more substance than the indictments of two other Trump foes: New York State Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey.

But Conway, one of Trump's most scathing critics on the right, also implied that Trump resents Bolton and other foes because he resents "smart people." And the attorney warned that Trump's disdain for intellectualism is a classic "fascist authoritarian" trait.

Conway told Longwell, "The whole attack on immigration is xenophobia, and xenophobia is a classic characteristic of fascist authoritarian movements. But another aspect of fascist and authoritarian movements is anti-intellectualism. They're against smart people who read books and do things. The whole attack on science that we're seeing at the universities, in CDC (the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), at the NIH (National Institutes of Health) — there's just this urge to take out the smart people, to take out the people who are hoity-toity, who they think look down on the people who vote for the fascist authoritarian. And it's part of the way that an authoritarian likes to divide people."

Conway didn't mince words when talking about the recent federal indictments of Trump foes.

"In a nutshell, the other two cases — the Comey case and the James case — look like b– – from the get-go. You read the complaints, the indictment, and you said, 'What?!' How does this make any sense?.... The complaints look flimsy, they don't make any sense on their face. The difference with Bolton's is you can see what the charges are."

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