South Carolina representative Trey Gowdy slammed Harry Reid in multiple interviews Sunday and Monday for his accusation that FBI director James Comey may have violated the Hatch Act, which limits the political activity of executive branch employees, in reopening the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails.
“Thank God he’s leaving, is my initial reaction,” Gowdy told Fox News on Sunday. “My second reaction is, I did not know Mormons used drugs. And anyone who is capable of sending out that press release has to be under the influence of something.”
Reid wrote a letter to Comey dated Sunday that read, in part:
The outgoing Senate minority leader accused Comey specifically of withholding information about Donald Trump’s “close ties and coordination” with the Russian government while “[rushing] to publicize … in the most negative light possible” what Reid termed “the slightest innuendo related to Secretary Clinton.”
Gowdy, one of the House GOP’s most outspoken prosecutors and the chairman of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, called the letter “laughable”.
“How Jim Comey supplementing his record before Congress somehow violates the Hatch Act is just laughable,” he said on Morning Joe Monday.
“I don’t consider what Comey did to be updating Congress on the substance of his investigation. I view it as supplementing his previous testimony.”
The FBI director’s correspondence to Capitol Hill said the Bureau “learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation” in the course of investigating an unrelated case. It was reported that the unrelated case was the FBI’s probe into former New York representative Anthony Weiner, who sent illicit text messages to an underage girl. Weiner is married to Clinton aide Huma Abedin, whose emails were found on Weiner’s laptop.
Clinton implored the FBI “to release all the information it has” after the letter was published. The WEEKLY STANDARD’s Bill Kristol also urged the Bureau to update the public on “the basic state of play ASAP,” and that it was “unacceptable” to not have additional information prior to Election Day.
Comey said he could not “predict how long it will take us to complete this additional work,” however. The Wall Street Journal reported it would be longer than the eight days from November 8: “It will take weeks, at a minimum, to determine whether those messages are work-related from the time Ms. Abedin served with Mrs. Clinton at the State Department; how many are duplicates of emails already reviewed by the FBI; and whether they include either classified information or important new evidence in the Clinton email probe.”
