Former Rep. Trey Gowdy said ex-FBI Director James Comey “has no one to blame but himself” if the attorney general finds any wrongdoing by the bureau in its handling of the Trump-Russia investigation, even if the main offenders are his subordinates.
In an op-ed Tuesday, Comey flatly rejected President Trump’s talk of “treason” committed by his team in how they handled the counterintelligence inquiry into Trump’s campaign.
In an interview with Fox News, where he is now a contributor, Gowdy said he would not use the word treason — “It’s a crime for which you could be put to death. So I’m pretty judicious in how I use it,” he reasoned — but the South Carolina Republican did explain why he believes Comey is far from blameless. This culpability, he said, stems from the behavior of his team in charge of the investigation, including chatter that spoke ill of Trump and the use of unverified information in Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant applications.
“Comey has … no one to blame but himself if he is concerned about what the investigation in 2016 may uncover,” Gowdy said. “Most FBI agents wouldn’t do any of what I described. Unfortunately the ones he picked did all of that.”
On Thursday, Trump empowered Attorney General William Barr with the “full and complete authority to declassify information” related to the origins of the federal investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. Barr has tasked U.S. Attorney John Durham with leading the review and is working closely with the Justice Department inspector general’s FISA abuse inquiry.
In his op-ed in the Washington Post, Comey welcomed Barr’s inquiry. “[G]o ahead, investigate the investigators, if you must. When those investigations are over, they will find the work was done appropriately and focused only on discerning the truth of very serious allegations,” Comey wrote.
Beyond Comey, other former FBI officials who are under scrutiny are Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, who exchanged text messages in which they displayed a negative opinion of Trump. Strzok was the lead investigator of the Hillary Clinton emails inquiry and opened the counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia in the summer of 2016.
[Related: Liz Cheney: Strzok-Page texts sound ‘an awful lot like a coup and it could well be treason’]
Although the Justice Department inspector general determined there was no evidence “improper considerations, including political bias, directly affected the specific investigative decisions” of Strzok and Page, Gowdy said to “imagine the frustration” Trump felt when he “read the lead agent that was put on this investigation promised to stop your campaign.”
Gowdy pointed to a text from Strzok, sent before he joined the Russia investigation, in which he said, “my gut sense and concern is there’s no big there there.”
“Then he mused if this was leading toward impeachment he would be interested in it. This is a career FBI agent who is supposed to dedicate his career to investigating Russia,” Gowdy said. “That was not enough for him. To investigate what Russia was doing to us was not enough for Peter Strzok. He was not interested unless it was going to lead to the political outcome of impeachment.”
In a recent interview, the former top lawyer at the FBI defended Strzok and the conduct of the rest of the bureau. “I was there. There was no conspiracy. There was no effort to engage in treason, a coup d’état, what ever term you want to use. There was just none of that,” former FBI General Counsel James Baker told MSNBC on Friday.
Baker, who admitted the DOJ inspector general makes him “nervous,” and former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe are also said to be under examination.
