Trey Gowdy: When did it become the Department of Justice's responsibility to exonerate people?
Katie Pavlich, Juan Williams, Andy McCarthy and Trey Gowdy discuss the first half of former Special Counsel Robert Muller's second Capitol Hill hearing before the House Intelligence Committee.
Democrats are now going all in to focus on obstruction, former House Oversight Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy said on Wednesday.
Appearing as part of Fox News' special coverage with anchors Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, Gowdy said that the Democrats had hoped former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s public testimony before the House Judiciary and House Intelligence Committees would fuel their narrative for the impeachment of President Donald Trump.
Wednesday's first hearing focused on whether the president had illegally obstructed justice by attempting to seize control of the Russia investigation.
The tone of questions fired at Mueller from both sides of the aisle oscillated like a political pinball machine. GOP allies tried to cast Mueller and his prosecutors as politically motivated, and Democrats sought to weaken the president’s 2020 re-election prospects by using sections of the report.
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“The big takeaway to me was: the Democrats wanted this to fuel their impeachment narrative,” Gowdy told the panel at the conclusion of Mueller's first hearing of the day. “And, I’ll bet you if they could cancel this afternoon’s HPSCI hearing, they would.”
This televised appearance by Mueller, a reluctant witness, on Capitol Hill is his first since wrapping the two-year Russia probe last spring.
“Well, he said he didn’t want to come and now we know why he didn’t want to come,” Gowdy stated. “I don’t think the report should have been made public. I don’t think he should have testified. Prosecutors don’t engage in these collateral consequences like impeachment. You either indict, or you shut up.”
Mueller, known for his reticent nature, had warned that his congressional testimony would not stray beyond the details revealed in his 448-page report. The Justice Department had also instructed him to stay within those parameters, giving him a formal directive to utilize if he faced questions he did not want to answer.
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According to CBS News, in Mueller’s first hearing gave one-word answers— “yes,” “no,” “true,” “correct,”—112 times over the course of almost four hours.
Gowdy said that directive was ineffective and so were most of his answers: “…he’s going to have to get better on the purview question. To argue that the Trump Tower meeting is in his purview, but meetings hours before and hours after are not, is a weakness that he’s just never been able to overcome.”
“That and the bias.”
“If you fired Peter Strzok because of an appearance of bias, but you kept people who showed up for what they’d hoped would be a victory party, and you kept people who donated to Secretary Clinton…you’ve got to reconcile how much bias is too much and how much of it is okay,” he said.
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Mueller’s second hearing of the day before the House Intelligence Committee will dive into ties between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin in 2016. Mueller’s report documented contact between the Russians and Trump associates, but the special counsel found insufficient evidence of a criminal conspiracy aiming to impact the election.
House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) is spearheading the second hearing. Gowdy told Baier and MacCallum that Schiff’s tactics have changed: “he hopes that we will not remember what he said in March of 2017. They’re going all obstruction. There is no conspiracy, no collusion—this is all obstruction.”
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Gowdy said that questions on the Russia investigation and interference in the election are a “ruse” to get Mueller to come back.
“But, based on the answers I heard this morning,” Gowdy stated, “he’s not going to be able to help them very much. Politically, it needs to be obstruction. They’d lose on collusion.”
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