Outgoing congressman says last week’s hearing shows that FBI just doing its Job.
As President Donald Trump continues to speak accuse the FBI on Twitter and at rallies of sending spies to “infiltrate” his campaign during the 2016 election, he received pushback Wednesday morning from an unexpected source: House Oversight Committee chairman Trey Gowdy, who defended the FBI’s conduct during an interview on CBS News.
“Think back to what the president himself said to James Comey. He said, ‘I didn’t collude with Russia, but if anyone connected with my campaign did, I want you to investigate it.’” It strikes me that that’s exactly what the FBI was doing,” Gowdy said. “Based on what I have seen, I don’t know what the FBI could have done or should have done other than run out a lead that someone loosely connected with the campaign was making assertions about Russia. I would think you would want the FBI to find out whether or not there was any validity to what those people were saying.”
Gowdy, who is retiring from Congress, has distinguished himself over the last year as one of the few Republican lawmakers who has remained supportive of the Justice Department and the Mueller investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election. His comments were particularly notable given that he was one of a handful of lawmakers invited to a confidential DoJ briefing last week at which the FBI’s 2016 use of an informant to meet with several members of the Trump campaign was discussed.
That such an informant existed, a fact first reported earlier this month, has formed the basis for Trump’s latest accusations of deep-state chicanery and hackish partisanship at the Justice Department. In 2016, as the FBI began its counterintelligence operation of whether Russia was attempting to undermine the election, the bureau had college professor Stefan Halper arrange to meet with several campaign staffers, including George Papadopoulos and Carter Page, to find out whether anyone in the campaign had knowledge of such Russian efforts. Or, in the president’s own typically bombastic and conspiratorial phrasing, the FBI “had people infiltrating our campaign.”
“Can you imagine people infiltrating our campaign? Is there anybody in this big, beautiful arena right now that’s infiltrating our campaign?” Trump said at a Nashville rally Tuesday. “Will you please raise your hand.” The president has further called the news “one of the biggest political scandals in U. S. history.”
After news of the informant became public, Trump ordered the Justice Department to open an investigation into whether the FBI had used him “for political purposes.” And he also ordered the classified briefings which Gowdy attended, along with House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes and congressional leadership in both parties, last Thursday. Nunes, who has echoed much of Trump’s dark rhetoric about the Justice Department, has not commented on what he learned in that briefing. But Gowdy now says that the information discussed then should reassure Trump that the FBI was simply doing their job.
“I think his laywers have an obligation to go share with him what Devin and Paul [Ryan] and I saw last week. And I’m convinced that when he sees it, he’s going to say, you know what, that’s what I told Comey I wanted the FBI to do.”
