Expressing concern about “the amnesia of people that are in the Trump orbit,” something he described as a “medical issue,” Rep. Trey Gowdy on Tuesday issued some of the harshest criticism yet by any GOP lawmaker of the Trump administration’s handling of the Russia controversies.
Gowdy’s remarks come in the wake of the most recent revelations about Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with a Kremlin-linked lawyer last June, after he was promised incriminating information about Hillary Clinton. “This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump,” an intermediary told Trump Jr. before the meeting.
“This drip, drip, drip, is undermining the credibility of this administration,” Gowdy said on Fox News. “Someone close to the president needs to get everyone connected with that campaign in a room and say, ‘from the time you saw Dr. Zhivago until the moment you drank vodka with a guy named Boris, you list every single one of those, and we are going to turn them over to the special counsel.’”
Gowdy said he was far more concerned about the “purported reason” for the meeting than the “real reason,” or a discussion of Russian adoption policy.
“The purported reason was for an agent of a foreign power to try to influence our election,” he said. “That concerns me more than someone trying to sit down with a member of perhaps an incoming administration to lobby for a policy change.”
Gowdy said he was also concerned about the legal implications of the meeting, but stressed that that aspect be left to special counsel Bob Mueller.
“I am going to let Bob Mueller sort out all the criminality,” he said. “That it is not the job of members of Congress, that is not the job of the the New York Times.”
The Russia revelations were also taking a toll on the GOP agenda and legislating, he said.
“Here we are on a Tuesday on a week we ought to be discussing infrastructure and tax reform, and we are still talking about Russia, and frankly with some good reason—because this email, we should have known about it before yesterday,” Gowdy said.
While the meeting “may amount to nothing,” the South Carolina congressman suggested that the preliminary reports could undermine GOP assertions about there being no collusion.
“Russian government’s efforts to help the Trump campaign, official documents,” he said, citing emails that led-up to the meeting and were tweeted out by Trump Jr. Tuesday. “Those are the kind of words that for months and months, Republicans have been saying, there is no evidence of collusion between Trump, the Trump campaign, or even hangers-on.”
