Conservative attorney and congressional candidate George Conway said that President Donald Trump waited years to assert a key presidential immunity defense in the E. Jean Carroll defamation case because he effectively "forgot" to raise it during the original proceedings.

Speaking during an episode of The Illegal News, Conway — a former prominent conservative commentator and one-time Trump ally — walked through the timeline of Trump's legal battle with writer E. Jean Carroll. A federal jury previously found Trump liable for defaming Carroll and awarded her $83.3 million in damages. Carroll had accused Trump of sexually assaulting her in a Manhattan department store in the mid-1990s. Trump repeatedly denied the allegation, and Carroll sued him for defamation over statements he made while disputing her claims.

The Trump administration's Solicitor General recently asked the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the $83.3 million judgment, arguing that Trump is not personally liable for the defamatory statements because he was serving as president when he made them. The request comes after the Supreme Court's landmark July 2024 ruling in Trump v. United States, which held that former presidents are entitled to presumptive immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts, significantly reshaping the legal landscape around presidential immunity — though that case addressed criminal liability rather than civil damages.

The legal argument in the Carroll case rests on the doctrine of presidential immunity. However, Conway noted, Trump did not raise this defense during the original proceedings presided over by U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan. Recounting the timeline, Conway said Trump "forgets to assert the immunity" earlier in the litigation.

"Now he's arguing that this judgment should be reversed," Conway said. "Even though he didn't make the presidential immunity argument for like three or four years."

Conway argued that Trump cannot revive an immunity defense he sat on for years. He drew a comparison to legislative immunity, noting that members of Congress cannot waive the immunity protecting their official speech and then later reclaim it. Trump, Conway said, is "a big boy" who should have known to raise the immunity defense from the outset.

According to Conway, the reason the presidential immunity argument never surfaced during the earlier stages of the case was that Trump's former attorney, Alina Habba, dismissed it. Instead, Trump's legal team spent years pursuing a different legal strategy tied to the Westfall Act, a federal statute that can extend certain protections to government employees for actions taken in the course of their official duties. The Justice Department under the Biden administration had previously concluded that Trump was acting within the scope of his employment when he denied Carroll's allegations, a determination that was central to the Westfall Act litigation. That approach, Conway said, mired the case in a "procedural morass."

Conway added that it would be "remarkable" if the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, noting that the justices typically steer clear of fact-intensive disputes.