Trey Gowdy backpedaled his defense of the FBI during the Russian investigation after Fox News host Tucker Carlson confronted him about the matter.
The former South Carolina congressman said on Monday’s Tucker Carlson Tonight that he was mistaken to trust the FBI and Justice Department while special counsel Robert Mueller was conducting his inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
Carlson played Gowdy a clip of his own 2018 remarks in which he said, “As of now, I think Chris Wray and Rod Rosenstein are stunned whenever people think Trump is the target of their investigation … I am even more convinced that the FBI did exactly what my fellow citizens would want them to do when they got the information they got, and that it has nothing to do with Donald Trump.”
Carlson then asked if he still maintains that position, and Gowdy responded in the negative, claiming he reneged the opinion three weeks after making the statement.
“I went over to the Department of Justice. I sat there for four hours. That’s when I saw that Peter Strzok actually initiated and approved Crossfire Hurricane. That’s when I saw the exculpatory information on George Papadopoulos. That’s when I saw, for the very first time, that it was the Trump campaign mentioned in that predicate document,” he said.
“My mistake was relying on the word of the FBI and the DOJ and not insisting on the documents,” he added.
In April 2019, Mueller released his long-awaited report on Russian election interference, which did not find evidence of criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. The investigation did, however, find substantial evidence that Russian actors actively attempted to influence the election.
Gowdy said congressional reports intended to ascertain Russia’s activities during the 2016 election validate Mueller’s conclusion about the country’s attempts, adding that he still believes the investigation was “not a witch hunt.”
Last week, the House Intelligence Committee released thousands of pages of transcripts from its closed-off interviews in 2017-2018 pertaining to Russian interference in the 2016 election. The documents showed James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence during the Obama administration, and other former officials admitted there was no direct evidence the Trump campaign colluded with a foreign entity to influence the election.
“I never saw any direct empirical evidence that the Trump campaign or someone in it was plotting/conspiring with the Russians to meddle with the election,” Clapper said. “That’s not to say that there weren’t concerns about the evidence we were seeing, anecdotal evidence. … But I do not recall any instance where I had direct evidence of the content of these meetings. It’s just the frequency and prevalence of them was of concern.”
U.S. Attorney John Durham, who was appointed by Attorney General William Barr, is currently investigating the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation.
