Outgoing House Oversight Chairman Trey Gowdy said Wednesday he wasn’t expecting fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions to be booted from the Justice Department before all the votes were counted in the 2018 midterm elections.
“I knew it was going to happen after the election,” Gowdy said during an interview on Fox News. “I did not think it would happen before all the votes had been counted, but he’s been a proverbial dead man walking for several months now.”
Gowdy, a South Carolina Republican set to retire from Congress in 2019, said the possibility of acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker appointing a second special counsel to investigate the genesis of the FBI’s probe into the 2016 Trump campaign and its connections to Russia was higher than that with Sessions at DOJ’s helm.
“Well, my chances were zero with Sessions because he said no,” Gowdy said. “So not to quote the movie ‘Dumb and Dumber,’ but I guess it’s one in a million. I guess it’s better than it was with Sessions.”
[Related: Schumer on Sessions resignation: ‘I find the timing very suspect’]
Congressional investigators have been looking into whether the FBI abused its surveillance powers and, more generally, whether agents conducted themselves properly and without bias as part of the bureau’s inquiry into links between Trump associates and the Kremlin.
Sessions was dismissed Wednesday following Trump repeatedly berating him over his March 2017 decision to recuse himself from overseeing special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe. Sessions was advised to stand down based on concerns he had been a surrogate for Trump in 2016 and his failure to disclose contacts with former Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
