Trey Gowdy Pans Lisa Page's Excuses for Anti-Trump Texts: 'Put Yourself in Donald Trump's Shoes'
Trey Gowdy’s still got it.
The former South Carolina congressman known for a rapier wit put that quality to good use on Monday night with Fox News’ Martha MacCallum, skewering this week’s public re-emergence of former FBI attorney Lisa Page.
Page, who has been largely silent since her 2018 testimony before Congress, used an interview published by The Daily Beast on Sunday to make a play for Americans’ sympathy. President Donald Trump wasn’t buying it, and neither was Gowdy.
In the interview, Page told ultra-liberal journalist Molly Jong-Fast that the numerous anti-Trump texts she exchanged with then-FBI Agent Peter Strzok (her adulterous lover at the time) had been taken out of “context.”
In his interview “The Story with Martha MacCallum” on Monday, Gowdy mocked the need for “context” in the kind of vicious material Page and Strzok texted each other about Trump and his supporters.
“When she says things need to be put in context, the word ‘loathsome’ really doesn’t need to be put in context,” Gowdy said, referring to one of the most notorious of the Strzok-Page exchanges. “And when you say somebody will be a national security disaster, that doesn’t need to be put in context.”
Gowdy showed zero patience with the sob story Page put out with the aid of a sympathetic journalist.
Page and Strzok “were talking about impeachment before even Adam Schiff was talking about impeachment,” Gowdy said, referring to the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and ringmaster for last month’s impeachment inquiry circus.
“Remember, Trump had just won in November, and they’re already swapping reading lists including ‘All the President’s Men,’ and musing, wantingly, about impeachment,” Gowdy said. “This is the same Peter Strzok, keep in mind, he didn’t want to be on an investigation into what a foreign country did to us in 2016, that wasn’t enough for him. If it wasn’t impeachment, he wanted nothing to do with it.”
Gowdy then explained the relevance of the Strzok-Page texts to the current impeachment drama.
“Put yourself in Donald Trump’s shoes. You’re being investigated — in fact, the investigation’s begun by a guy who says he can smell your supporters, will do anything he can to stop it. They think you’re ‘loathsome,’ they think you’re an effing idiot. … That’s who is dispassionately investigating someone?
“No wonder he’s got so little confidence in the FBI right now.”
MacCallum noted that in her Daily Beast interview, Page claimed her texts were merely an exercise of her First Amendment right to free speech that had no bearing on how she or Strzok conducted themselves professionally.
Gowdy was openly dismissive.
“Yep, she does have freedom of speech, and we have the freedom to reject what she said and tell her we don’t believe it,” he said.
“The broader point is this: Keep in mind that Strzok and Page, the Democrats and the D.C. media’s argument is, ‘Yeah, they were biased, yeah, they said terrible things, but it had no impact on the outcome [of the investigation].’ In other words, Trump was treated fairly in the end.”
He contrasted that with the Democrats’ argument in impeaching Trump over temporarily withheld military aid to Ukraine, allegedly so the president could strong-arm the Ukraine government into investigating Democratic presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden.
Ukraine got the military aid, there was no investigation of Biden, so by Democratic “all’s-well-that-ends-well” logic, that should be the end of it, Gowdy said.
But for Democrats, he said, “That’s not enough. It still may be impeachable just cause we didn’t like your process.”
“That’s duplicity,” Gowdy said. “It’s a double standard, and that’s why the American people, I think, are completely unmoved, thus far, by the impeachment hearings of Chairman Schiff.”
Gowdy finished the interview with a warning: Virtually no one expects a Republican-controlled Senate to come up with a two-thirds vote to impeach Trump. But the real goal of the proceedings might really be to win control of the upper chamber in the 2020 elections.
Then Trump would be facing not only a House Speaker Nancy Pelosi but a Senate majority leader in New York Democrat Chuck Schumer.
“This is not about removing Donald Trump from office, because they know they’re not going to be successful. … If they can win the Senate, even if they lose the White House in 2020, then he is a neutered president,” Gowdy told MacCallum.
“And I’ve always thought this is much more about the Senate than it is removing someone from office, because they’re not going to get a conviction in the Senate trial.”
Amid the impeachment frenzy, that’s one factor that isn’t talked about nearly enough, but Gowdy has a point.
If Trump wins in 2020 and ends up facing a hostile Senate as well as a hostile House, the past two years might look like a game of pattycake.
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