The GOP lawmaker was once a conservative hero. Now he’s under fire on the right for balking at Trump’s ‘spygate’ theory.
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.
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.
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“He’s drinking the Kool-Aid," Rudy Giuliani said of Trey Gowdy, just one of Trump's allies to attack Gowdy after the congressman challenged the president's claims that there were "spies" inside his campaign https://t.co/29aC0b1x0d
— POLITICO (@politico) June 2, 2018
This article is striking and depressing. Trey Gowdy strayed from the line a bit, in order to tell the truth as he sees it, and much of the Right pounced on him. This is what Communists do, not Republicans, traditionally. What the hell? https://t.co/9SRfys3xiH
— Jay Nordlinger (@jaynordlinger) June 2, 2018
Trump and his supporters are always on the lookout for enemies — real or imagined. And they will resort to anything outlandish to try to discredit those enemies.
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