Trump allies gang up on Trey Gowdy:
Rep. Trey Gowdy has been a pitbull investigator for Republicans for years. Now, he’s in President Donald Trump’s doghouse for daring to challenge the president’s unsupported claim that Democrats and their sympathizers in the FBI embedded a spy in his 2016 campaign.
Trump allies have been pummeling Gowdy in recent days, branding him a gullible or clueless backer of the intelligence community. Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, labeled him “uninformed.” Another Trump-tied attorney, Victoria Toensing, said Gowdy “doesn’t know diddly-squat” about the particulars of federal investigations. And Fox News host Lou Dobbs tagged him a “RINO” — a term for a fake Republican.
Rep. Trey Gowdy has been a pitbull investigator for Republicans for years. Now, he’s in President Donald Trump’s doghouse for daring to challenge the president’s unsupported claim that Democrats and their sympathizers in the FBI embedded a spy in his 2016 campaign.
Trump allies have been pummeling Gowdy in recent days, branding him a gullible or clueless backer of the intelligence community. Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, labeled him “uninformed.” Another Trump-tied attorney, Victoria Toensing, said Gowdy “doesn’t know diddly-squat” about the particulars of federal investigations. And Fox News host Lou Dobbs tagged him a “RINO” — a term for a fake Republican.
Wow. What made them all turn against him?
Gowdy insisted that the FBI did not, in fact, plant a spy in the Trump camp for political purposes. Rather, he said, the FBI appropriately deployed an informant to glean intelligence from members on the outer edge of Trump’s campaign. The FBI had received troubling evidence that those individuals had suspect ties to Russia, and the bureau had been obligated to pursue those legitimate leads, Gowdy said. The briefing, for only a select group of nine senior lawmakers of both parties, only bolstered his position, he said.
“I am even more convinced that the FBI did exactly what my fellow citizens would want them to do when they got the information they got — and that it has nothing to do with Donald Trump,” Gowdy said in the interview.
The comments soon earned him punishing rebukes from Trump’s most vocal allies. Fox’s Sean Hannity said Wednesday that “Trey Gowdy doesn’t get it.” Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, father of White House press secretary Sarah Sanders, distributed a 950-word treatise Friday questioning Gowdy’s position. And Dobbs said Gowdy appeared to be auditioning for a job after he leaves Congress.
Oh, I see. Gowdy had the audacity to tell the truth.
Here’s an interesting tidbit:
Gowdy revealed in a CBS interview on Wednesday that he has “never met or talked to” Trump, a startling fact for a senior lawmaker who has had an outsize role in the House for years. Meanwhile, Trump approvingly quoted comments Gowdy made about Attorney General Jeff Sessions in a series of tweets Wednesday.
But that didn’t stop the onslaught of attacks on Gowdy from Trump’s most vocal allies. “He’s drinking the Kool-Aid,” Giuliani said of Gowdy in a CNN interview, before saying Gowdy “screwed up” on Benghazi.
Huckabee said Gowdy seemed to unquestioningly accept the Justice Department’s briefing on the FBI informant. “Such credulity seems strangely out of character for someone like Gowdy, a seasoned prosecutor who knows better than to believe people who continue to hide mountains of evidence,” Huckabee wrote.
Gowdy’s office declined to comment for this story.
Look, Gowdy is a partisan creep. But he is also a lawyer and, unlike Giuliani, isn’t about to invent crimes that don’t exist.