George Conway, a conservative lawyer and the husband of former Donald Trump aide Kellyanne Conway, said that it would be hard for "any fair jury" not to convict the former president over his handling of sensitive government documents recovered from his Florida residence.
Mr Conway appeared on The Daily Beast's podcast "The New Abnormal" hosted by journalist Molly Jong-Fast, and said the while he "can't guarantee" that Mr Trump will see the inside of of a jail cell, he did predict that "there's a reasonable likelihood of it."
"I think it's going to be very difficult for the Justice Department to decline prosecuting him," Mr Conway said. "I think before any fair jury, he'd have to be convicted based upon what we're seeing. There's still more evidence that needs to come out, but everything points to him being in a heap of trouble and we haven't seen everything that the Justice Department has."
Ms Jong-Fast pushed back and asked what Mr Trump's legal team could do to help him avoid possible prosecution and conviction. Mr Conway said there was "nothing" they could do at this point, claiming the "mistakes" that Mr Trump already made may ultimately damn him.
"The mistakes he made, he already made," he said. "The one way he had out of this was to basically turn the documents over a year ago, and not chuck the government around. They wouldn't have prosecuted him, even though if you or I — if we had taken this s*** home — we would be in jail."
Since the 8 August FBI search at Mar-a-Lago, Mr Trump has insisted that he is the victim of a politically motivated witch hunt, going so far as to suggest the "raid" amounts to election interference.
Mr Trump has not announced his candidacy for any office and it is not a presidential election year.
Mr Conway is not the only person formerly in Mr Trump's orbit to criticise him over the document scandal. Former Attorney General William Bar said on Friday that the former president misled the Justice Department in a defense of the FBI search he made during an interview on Fox News.
“[The Justice Department] jawboned for a year, they were deceived on the voluntary actions taken, they then went and got a subpoena, they were deceived on that — they feel,” Mr Barr said. “The facts are starting to show they were being jerked around, so how long do they wait?”
When asked if there were any legitimate reasons Mr Trump would have taken the sensitive documents and stored them at Mar-a-Lago, Mr Barr came up empty.
Mr Barr said "I can't think of a legitimate reason why," he said, noting that didn't buy Mr Trump's claim that he "declassified everything."
“I, frankly, am skeptical of this claim that 'I declassified everything,'” Mr Barr said. “I think it’s highly improbable … if in fact he sort of stood over scores of boxes, not really knowing what was in them, and said, 'I hereby declassify everything in here.' That would be such an abuse, and — that shows such recklessness that it’s almost worse than taking the documents.”
