Trey Gowdy: Democrats 'Did Everything They Could' To Keep FISA Memo Information From Public Eye
Rep. Trey Gowdy said that the classified memo that some members of Congress have said details abuses of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act under the Obama administration would be “embarrassing” to Intel Committee’s ranking Democrat Rep. Adam Schiff.
On Fox News’ “Fox & Friends” Tuesday, Gowdy assured the hosts that he supported special counsel Robert Mueller “100 percent,” but Schiff was trying to keep the public from knowing the truth, according to Breitbart.
“I think it will be embarrassing to Adam Schiff once people realize the extent to which he went to keep them from learning any of this,” Gowdy said. “That would be the embarrassment.”
When he was asked to clarify, Gowdy pointed out the specifics of Schiff’s efforts to hide the truth.
“I mean, going to court to help Fusion GPS so we can’t find out they paid for the dossier, and that they were working for the DNC. That’s a pretty big step to go to court to try to keep the American people from learning something,” he said. “So, if it were up to Adam Schiff, you wouldn’t know about Hillary Clinton’s email. You wouldn’t know about the server. You wouldn’t know about the dossier. I do find it ironic that he has his own memo right now because if it were up to him, we wouldn’t know any of it.”
After the U.S. House Intelligence Committee voted to release the memo, Schiff said the vote made Monday a “very sad day, I think, in the history of this committee,” Fox News reported.
“Today this committee voted to put the president’s personal interests, perhaps their own political interests, above the national interests,” the Democrat said, announcing the vote to the media. Schiff said the vote was strictly along party lines, with no Democrats voting to release the details of the memo.
“Look, my Democratic colleagues didn’t want us to find this information,” Gowdy said on Tuesday in response. “They did everything they could to keep us from finding this information.”
The committee also rejected the possible release of a Democrat-authored “counter memo.”
Gowdy said he had “voted to let the Democrat memo to see the light” so that people could make their own decision about the memos.
“Politics has denigrated to the point where it’s about winning and about embarrassing the other side,” he added.
When “Fox & Friends” hosts asked what questions Gowdy would ask his colleagues to get to the truth, he answered:
“What my main interest is the integrity of the DOJ and the FBI. How pervasive is the bias? I want to believe that out of the 30,000 employees it was just those two.” The two agents he referred to were FBI official Peter Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page who exchanged anti-Trump text messages.
President Donald Trump, whose administration has previously indicated it did not object to the memo being released to the public, has five days to step in to prevent its release.
“We want full transparency,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters Monday. “That’s what we have said all along.”
Republican members of Congress have described the information contained in the four-page document as “shocking,” “troubling” and “alarming.” At least one representative compared the activities contained in the memo to those of the Russian KGB.
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