Trey Gowdy, the former Congressman who would probably still be investigating Benghazi if he had his way, wants to keep the far-more significant Mueller report from the public. Gee, do you think this former member of the House Intelligence Committee is trying to hide something?
Do you think Gowdy would have demanded a Benghazi report be kept secret?
It’s more than ironic for Gowdy to be demanding that the Department of Justice just file away the Mueller report. Gowdy is the guy who justified the eighth fruitless Benghazi investigation because an Obama administration email about talking points had been withheld from Congress.
Gowdy suddenly doesn't care about the public’s right to know
Fox’s own legal analyst, Andrew Napolitano, said two days before this interview that there will almost certainly be some very damning evidence in the Mueller report that Attorney General William Barr explicitly said did not exonerate Trump on the question of obstruction of justice.
Gowdy, now a Fox News contributor, told host Neil Cavuto on Saturday, “I don’t think the report should be released at all. And I’m frankly surprised that so many Republicans think it should be.”
Gowdy based his argument with a weasel-words allegation, “A lot of Republicans think the investigation was flawed from its inception.”
“Remember that Trump was biased [sic], that Papadopolous was set up, that the dossier was a political hit piece. So if the investigation was flawed from its inception, why is the report not also flawed?” Gowdy asked.
For one thing, Trump’s hand-picked attorney general, the one who auditioned for the job by ruling out obstruction of justice in advance of his nomination, doesn’t seem to think the report flawed. And if the inquiry is so biased, why aren’t its conclusions more incriminating?
“I don’t think the report should be released because the Department of Justice speaks in indictments. They’ve already indicted a lot of people. That’s the way the Department of Justice speaks. … If you’re not indicted, I don’t know that the Department of Justice should be releasing a political hit piece that people like Schiff and Nadler are then going to use for 2020,” Gowdy whined.
Instead of pointing out that there is a big public interest in knowing what the special counsel found out about any cooperation with Russia in its efforts to influence our election, Cavuto merely said, “Well regardless, it is going to come out. There might be portions redacted sir, to your concern, but it is coming out.” He also wondered if there might be “other things that could be interpreted differently than Barr has.”
'Post partisan' Gowdy lies to weaponize the Mueller report and discredit any unfavorable-to-Trump findings
Like most of us, Gowdy has not seen the Mueller report. But despite claiming to have left Congress because he didn’t like the extreme partisanship, Gowdy pre-smeared anyone who might not think the report absolves Trump as someone who "didn't like the result." He sneered, “Keep in mind, these are some of the same people that were introducing bills to protect Mueller. … Little did we know that he would need to be protected from Nancy Pelosi and Schiff and other people who just don’t like what he found.”
Gowdy went on to falsely claim that in his letter to Congress purporting to provide Mueller's "principal conclusions," Barr “shared” a line from the report saying, “Despite multiple opportunities, the Trump campaign never colluded, coordinated, conspired with Russia.” That is a lie.
FACT CHECK: Barr actually quoted Mueller as saying the investigation "did not establish" coordination or conspiracy. Gowdy, a former prosecutor surely knows that is not at all the same as a finding that such a thing never happened.
Napolitano made that point in his earlier comments about the Mueller report - which occurred on Cavuto's Fox Business show. Napolitano said Mueller “must have found some evidence of a conspiracy because if he found none, that would have made its way into Bill Barr’s letter.” But Cavuto said nothing to challenge Gowdy.
Instead, Gowdy went on to accuse the Clinton campaign of taking “Russian dirt and actually [having] paid for it."
Cavuto kissed up. “You raise a good point. I’m not a lawyer, I know you are and a very good one.”
Gowdy suddenly cares about truth and keeping classified information secret - in order to attack Adam Schiff
Mr. Partisanship Hater took some gratuitous swipes at House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff by joining the GOP attacks demanding he step down: “There ain’t a crazy person on the Republican side on House Intel. So for them to collectively say, “Chairman Schiff, we’ve lost confidence in your ability to lead, then what may happen next is the intelligence community may say you know, Chairman Schiff, you prejudge investigations, you disregard facts, reports, evidence, we’re not going to share any more information with you.”
Cavuto called Gowdy’s bluff. “Do you know if that’s happening, sir?”
No, he didn’t. “But I mean if you’re the CIA, why are you going to risk your life providing information to someone who has a well-deserved reputation for leaking, and is going to disregard evidence because of his hatred for the president?” Gowdy asked.
Now that's rich. Because it was Gowdy and his gang of House Intel Republicans who voted to publicly release a memo containing very sensitive information over the objections of the Department of Justice, which called such a release “extraordinarily reckless,” in a dishonest effort to discredit the FBI’s Russia investigation.
Predictably, Cavuto didn’t mention it. He closed the interview with a stamp of approval: “Trey Gowdy, good lawyer and all.”
Watch Gowdy’s dishonest hypocrisy below, from the March 30, 2019 Cavuto Live.