Rep. Trey Gowdy has been a pitbull investigator for Republicans for years. Now, he’s is 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.
It’s the latest twist in Gowdy’s enigmatic tenure in Congress. Once a conservative hero for his headline-grabbing inquisitions of the Obama administration — over the “Fast and Furious” gun-running program and alleged IRS targeting of conservatives, as well as his highly charged Benghazi probe — Gowdy has also bedeviled partisans by sometimes refusing to toe a pro-Trump line. At times, Trump himself has seemed perplexed; in the span of two years, the president once hailed Gowdy as a brilliant lawmaker before bashing him as a failure and then embracing him once again.
Now, after years shouldering the House GOP’s weightiest and most politically explosive investigations, he’s again drawn the ire of Trump-world. And this time, he’s virtually alone, getting little support from his House colleagues.
The retiring South Carolina Republican’s emergence as a critic of Trump’s conspiracy theory began Tuesday, when Gowdy went on Fox News to discuss his takeaway from a classified Justice Department briefing last week about the president’s claims.
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.
Speaker Paul Ryan, one of just four other Republicans to attend last week’s Justice Department briefing on the matter, has not addressed the substance of Gowdy’s assertions. But asked whether he backed them, Ryan’s office issued a broad statement of support for the House Oversight Committee chairman.
“The speaker has full confidence in Chairman Gowdy’s judgement, and is grateful for his leadership and service,” Ryan spokeswoman AshLee Strong said Friday.
The other GOP lawmakers in the briefing included House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr. The Democrats who attended — House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Intelligence Committee top Democrat Adam Schiff and Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner — issued a joint statement declaring that no information in the briefing supported Trump's claim of a politically motivated spy in his campaign.
The episode isn't the first time Gowdy has ended up frustrating Trump’s circle. House conservatives, Trump allies and even Trump himself blasted Gowdy in June 2016 for declining to issue a harsher indictment of Hillary Clinton’s role in the Benghazi attacks that left four Americans dead in 2012.
Trump, who in 2014
praised Gowdy’s ascension to lead the Benghazi probe as a “great decision,” has had a seesawing relationship with the soft-spoken South Carolinian in recent years. In July 2015, Trump tweeted a supporters’ suggestion that Gowdy become his attorney general. But he soured on him in late 2015, when Gowdy endorsed his primary rival Sen. Marco Rubio. “I hope @TGowdySC does better for Rubio than he did at the #Benghazi hearings, which were a total disaster for Republicans & America!” he
tweeted at the time.
But by mid-2016, Trump was ready to embrace Gowdy again after earning his endorsement. “Thank you for your wonderful endorsement today @TGowdySC. It means a great deal to me,” Trump
tweeted at the time. “We will not disappoint!”
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.
For years, Gowdy has been considered one of the GOP’s most versatile and skilled legal experts, owing to his background as a federal prosecutor. In addition to chairing the House Oversight Committee, he has seats on the Intelligence and Judiciary committees, which put him in a prominent position to tackle high-profile investigations.
Democrats view Gowdy with suspicion because he led investigations that broke down into partisan acrimony, such as the Benghazi probe and the review of GOP allegations that the IRS targeted conservative groups for extra scrutiny. More recently, Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, has bristled at Gowdy’s refusal to subpoena the Trump administration for documents and testimony, even when the White House has flouted bipartisan demands.
But Gowdy has also heartened Democrats with his vocal support of the FBI and special counsel Robert Mueller, who have come under attack from Trump supporters. And that’s put him in a vulnerable position among House Republicans who have largely kept quiet in the face of Trump’s attacks on law enforcement.
In addition to defending FBI conduct this week, Gowdy urged Trump to sit for an interview with Mueller and said if he’s done nothing wrong, he should tell Mueller the same things in public that he’s said in private.
“He didn’t collude with Russia, he doesn’t know anything about it, and if anyone in his campaign did, he wants the public to know it,” Gowdy said on CBS. “I think that’s what he ought to tell Mueller.”
Trump’s allies in the House — who have been aggressive attack dogs in support of Trump’s claims of FBI misconduct — have not lashed Gowdy as harshly as those outside the Capitol.
Rep. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.), a top Trump ally seeking to undermine the ongoing Russia probes, took issue with Gowdy’s conclusion in an interview, but then turned his criticism toward the FBI, suggesting agents should have briefed the Trump campaign about their efforts to investigate certain aides.
And House Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows (R-N.C.)., who routinely talks to Trump, said Gowdy’s assertions speak to a need for the Justice Department to provide even more information to Congress than what conservative hard-liners have already received.
“I am anxious to see what documents Chairman Gowdy has reviewed that would lead him to believe that the FBI did everything above board,” Meadows said.
