Trey Gowdy said on Tuesday that former CIA Director John Brennan is in more jeopardy than former FBI Director James Comey for the use of an unverified dossier for the Trump-Russia investigation.
During an interview on Fox News, the former Republican congressman from South Carolina discussed a document he saw as a leading GOP investigator before his retirement from Congress.
“I think that it’s one more place for Mr. Durham to start,” Gowdy said, referring to U.S. Attorney John Durham, who has been tasked by Attorney General William Barr to look into the origins of the Russia investigation.
“That’s a pretty easy thing to sort out, who insisted that the dossier or the unverified material from Chris Steele be included,” he said. “But … sometimes when you have two people, I can tell from you having been in the courtroom, sometimes when people are blaming each other, they are both right. It’s both of them. And I think it’s interesting Brennan and Comey right now, the only thing they seem to share is a hatred for Donald Trump. It’s going to be interesting if they begin to turn on one another. I’ve seen the document. I’m not going to describe it any more than that, Comey’s got a better argument than Brennan based on what I have seen.”
His interview Tuesday follows a Fox News appearance on Monday in which he encouraged investigators to track down emails between Brennan and Comey in December 2016.
Host Martha MacCallum, who conducted the Tuesday interview with Gowdy, said Fox News is reporting that those emails show Brennan discussing with Comey the use of the unverified dossier in the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment on Russian interference in the 2016 election.
The declassified January 2017 report determined Russia had ordered an “influence campaign” to help Trump get elected in 2016. There is no mention of the dossier, compiled by British ex-spy Christopher Steele, which contained salacious and unverified claims about Trump’s ties to Russia. It was used by the FBI to obtain a series of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants to wiretap one-time Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
There have been reports, including by veteran journalist Bob Woodward, that the dossier was included in an early draft of the assessment. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said in March he was told Brennan “insisted” the dossier be included in the report. “BREAKING: A high-level source tells me it was Brennan who insisted that the unverified and fake Steele dossier be included in the Intelligence Report … Brennan should be asked to testify under oath in Congress ASAP,” Paul tweeted.
Brennan, a vocal critic of Trump, served as CIA director from 2013 to Jan. 20, 2017, the day of Trump’s inauguration. He appeared on MSNBC on Tuesday and said there is “ample evidence to justify what the FBI and the intelligence community did in the summer” of 2016.
Comey, who was fired by Trump in May 2017, and former FBI General Counsel James Baker have said they are confident the bureau did nothing wrong in obtaining the warrants, although Baker admitted the DOJ inspector general’s FISA abuse investigation will find “mistakes.”
