Watch: Gowdy Blows the Lid Off Comey's Fox News Interview, Mentions 'Felony'
James Comey’s got at least one critic he can’t con.
In an interview with Fox News’ Tucker Carson on Thursday night, South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy took apart some of the former FBI director’s latest versions of the events that led up to and directly followed Comey’s firing by President Donald Trump last year.
And he all but called Comey a liar in the process.
In an appearance earlier Thursday on Fox News “Special Report,” Comey made a series of claims from his time as FBI director investigating “collusion” between the Donald Trump presidential campaign and Russia.
Comey told host Bret Baier that he isn’t sure how much of the infamous, now debunked “Trump dossier,” compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele, was paid for by the Democrat National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign.
He downplayed the importance of the dossier in obtaining a warrant to spy on Trump associate Carter Page.
Comey even denied that he had engaged in “leaking” when he secretly gave memos he’d written about his meetings with Trump to a friend to have them published in The New York Times.
Carlson zeroed in on those issues with Gowdy.
“He doesn’t remember a lot,” Carlson said. “He doesn’t remember when he first heard about the Steele dossier. He doesn’t remember who told him about the Steele dossier. Is that plausible?”
Gowdy, whose reputation for exactness in language and tenacity in grilling witnesses have earned him the nickname “Bulldog,” was having none of Comey’s latest line. It wasn’t plausible at all, he said.
“If he learned about it in the fall of 2016, and it was already known that the Democrats had picked up on that work, so, whoever briefed him… Why would you just say the Republicans started it but not also include the Democrats finished it? So that, that …”
Gowdy didn’t have to say, “that’s a lie.” Anyone listening understood it.
He then turned to how Comey minimalized the role the dossier played in the FBI’s application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court when it was seeking a warrant to investigate Trump associate Carter Page as an alleged “agent of a foreign power.”
“I’ve actually read the application, and it is just wrong,” Gowdy said. “It was an indispensable part of the application. Period.”
But it was Comey’s denial in the Baier interview that he’d “leaked” information that Gowdy hit the hardest. In Comey’s world, apparently, a “leak” only occurs when the information that’s surreptitiously released involves information that’s officially considered “classified” by the government.
Gowdy blasted that for the nonsense it is.
“The other thing that I will tell you, Tucker, that I learned tonight is Jim Comey has a definition of the word ‘leak’ that no one else has,” Gowdy said.
“What he says is a leak is what the rest of us call a felony,” Gowdy said. “Leaking is disclosing a confidential conversation which is exactly what he did.”
They were only three of the points Gowdy covered, but they blew the lid off key parts of the story Comey’s shilling as he travels the publicity circuit to peddle the memoirs he titled “A Higher Loyalty.”
He’s been getting a respectful greeting from liberals like ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, and he’s been getting grilled by interviewers like Baier.
But whatever their politics, few know the inside story about Comey the way Gowdy does, a member of the House Intelligence Committee whose years as a federal prosecutor have given him an insight into law enforcement most American civilians can’t match.
And with Gowdy, Comey has a critic he can’t con.
Truth and Accuracy
We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.
