Republican Rep. Trey Gowdy of South Carolina said he is troubled by recent abuses at the FBI and believes it’s time to bring in an independent investigator to clean house.
“The Department of Justice has a conflict so they should not conduct this investigation,” Gowdy said Wednesday on “America’s Newsroom.” “Michael Horowitz the inspector general doesn’t have access to non-DOJ employees or those who have left the department or the FBI so he can’t do it. It needs to be done. It needs to be done by somebody your viewers have confidence in. And I’ve been reluctant in the past to call for special counsel but this is a unique fact pattern and I think a special counsel is the only entity that can do this effectively.”
“I’ve got to confess to you, I am biased towards law enforcement,” Gowdy continued on Fox News.”The FBI agents I’ve worked with never evidenced this kind of bias or animus towards even a bank robber much less a presidential candidate. I don’t what happened with these two particular agents. And I don’t know why the bureau would use opposition research in a court filing and they didn’t brother to vet it or investigate it. You can be a fan of the FBI and still be troubled by what they’ve done and want to understand better how and why it happened.”
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Gowdy is not interested in a special counsel to investigate former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s email scandal because he doesn’t believe it would prevail in court.
“You can never go in front of the jury when the nation’s top law enforcement officer, Jim Comey would be defense witness number one. You just have no prospect of winning that case,” he said. “So I am disappointed they decided not to charge her before they interviewed her. I’m disappointed in the way the investigation took place but that ship has sailed and I don’t think you can go back in this fact pattern after what Comey has said and have any chance of prevailing in a courtroom.”
Gowdy also expressed confidence in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court despite news of possible bias and corruption.
“We get rid of the bad actors but we don’t throw out the process,” he concluded. “The process has worked. This is the first conversation you and I have ever had — this fact pattern about FISA, even though it’s been around two decades. So it’s not the process, it’s the actors who were involved in 2016. And I think we’ve got to be mindful to identify the folks who did not do their jobs properly, but don’t throw out the entire process because we have a handful of bad actors.”
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