Former House Oversight Chairman Trey Gowdy claimed during in an interview on Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo that secret transcripts of a discussion involving former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos are an example of “textbook exculpatory information.”
Gowdy also claimed that the potentially exonerating info was misleadingly concealed from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court by the FBI, and that this is not the only mysterious transcript yet to be released.
Bartiromo said that she had spoken with Papadopoulos on Saturday night, during which he told her that the recorded conversation in question involves him and FBI informant Stefan Halper in September 2016. Papadopoulos allegedly pushed back against Halper’s suggestion that he or the Trump campaign would have wanted Russia to release the Democratic National Committee emails it hacked in 2016.
Gowdy, who has declined to provide specifics about the contents of the classified FBI document, neither confirmed nor denied that the transcript involved Papadopoulos and Halper, but strongly hinted that Bartiromo was correct.
Gowdy told Bartiromo that this transcript “certainly has the potential to be” a game changer and said that he was “lost” and “clueless” as to why it hadn’t been made public yet, stating that he didn’t think it contained any information that would have an impact on relationships with our allies.
Gowdy further said that the transcripts would show “what questions [the FBI] coached the informants or the cooperating witnesses to ask of the Trump campaign officials” and implied that the questions would show that the FBI had been targeting the Trump campaign rather than simply attempting to combat Russian election interference.
Gowdy claimed that if the transcripts showed that the FBI was “veering over into the campaign or your [the FBI’s] questions are not solely about Russia, then you [the FBI] have been misleading us for two years.”
“The good thing about transcripts they don’t have to remember,” Gowdy said. “All you got to do is read them. They don’t have bad memories. Just release the transcripts and we can tell for ourselves when it began and what it was about.”
Bartiromo then said that “George Papadopoulos told me last night” that the transcript Gowdy was referring to is from a conversation Papadopoulos had with Halper in London at the Sofitel Hotel in London where she recounted that, according to Papadopoulos, Halper questioned Papadopoulos, saying, “Russia has all of these e-mails of Hillary Clinton and you know, and when they get out that would be really good for you, right? That would be really good for you and the Trump campaign, if all those e-mails got out, right?”
But Bartiromo says Papadopoulos responded to Halper by saying “that’s crazy,” “that would be treason,” “people get hanged for stuff,” and “I would never do something like that.”
Gowdy didn’t dispute the accuracy of Bartiromo’s story, and sarcastically said that the revelations in the Papadopoulos transcript should have been presented to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court “only if you want a justice system that’s fair” and “only if you want a justice system that treats people fairly.”
“It also speaks to what the FBI and the department were doing back in 2016,” Gowdy said “Was their target Russia or was there target the Trump campaign? We’re not going to know until you make the transcript public.”
“The one you referenced is a single transcript, but there are going to be others,” Gowdy added.
