Trey Gowdy Losing his Mind

Vincent J. Curtis

30 May 2018

Yesterday, on Martha MacCallum’s Fox News show, The Story, Congressman Trey Gowdy was interviewed on the meeting that took place last week between House Republicans and the Department of Justice.  The purpose of the meeting was to work out the delivery of documents what were subpoena’d by two committees he is on: House Intelligence and House Oversight, which he chairs.

In the course of the interview, Gowdy demonstrated a prosecutorial mindset that he seems unable to shake.  Asked about the Mueller investigation, Gowdy expressed his usual opinion that the Mueller investigation needs to be allowed to finish its work.  Then he said two remarkable things: that the Mueller probe was just doing what Trump had asked Comey to do, and he encouraged President Trump, if he had nothing to hide, to consent to be interviewed by Mueller.  Only a prosecutor would offer the legal advice to the accused to talk to investigators.  Every defense attorney on TV has said that it would be madness for Trump to speak to Mueller, would strongly advise against it, and have said that as a rule it is never a good thing for the accused to speak to investigators for fear of a perjury trap.  Gowdy claimed that Trump was not a subject or target of the investigation, though he admitted that that could change on the testimony of some witness.

Perhaps Adam Schiff hasn’t beaten Gowdy about the head hard enough yet, for Gowdy reveals a belief in the good faith of Mueller that plenty of evidence proves he doesn’t deserve.

Let’s start with the assertion that Mueller is simply doing what Trump asked Comey to do.  When Trump said something like that to Comey, it was early in February, 2017.  Trump did not then know that the FBI and CIA had been running MI6 agents at his campaign since April, 2016.  He did not then know that the FBI tried to insert several spies or informants into his campaign.  He did not then know that the FBI and Rod Rosenstein were then and for six months afterwards running a FISA wiretap on Carter Page.  He did not then know that he had been “wiretapped” by the Obama administration in the time of the transition.  He was not then aware that the Steele dossier had been bought and paid for by the Hillary campaign.  In other words, Trump took Comey in good faith and was not then aware of all the bad faith surveillance and insinuation that had taken place behind the scenes from April 2016 through the transition period and was continuing at that very moment, the effort to render Trump’s presidency illegitimate on the charge that he won the office as a result of Russian collusion or aid of some sort.

The evidence of Mueller’s bad faith investigation starts with the hiring of “13 Angry Democrats”, as Trump calls them.  Attorneys who have all demonstrated loyalty to the Democrat party and who have long histories of prosecutorial abuse.  The pre-dawn raid on Paul Manafort when he was a cooperating witness, and the raid on the office of Trump’s private attorney Michael Cohen, and the persecution of many people around Trump all combine to show a desire to destroy everyone around Trump on matters unrelated to “Russia.”

Mueller has demonstrated no interest in the origin of the Steele dossier, and has instead relied upon it as the basis for his enquiry.  The alleged intention that he was to discover and report on Russian interference in the 2016 election falls to the ground in the face of what is already known: that it was so small and insignificant that it couldn’t possibly have affected the outcome of the election, and the “not have changed the outcome” has been the accepted view of the intelligence community from the beginning.

The encouragement by Gowdy for Trump to submit to be interviewed by Mueller shows how confined Gowdy’s view of the law is.  In the first place, for Trump to do so establishes a constitutional problem that may bedevil future presidencies.  The special council is a creature of the Justice Department, which in turn exercises the authority of the president.  Thus we would have a precedent of a subordinate official being able to compel the president to submit to his interrogation – on a matter in which the president is not a fact witness or a suspect.

The questions the Mueller reportedly wants to ask Trump have nothing to do with facts or with Russian collusion.  His questions revolve around obstruction of justice – obstructing of the FBI investigation into Lt-General Michael Flynn, and the firing of James Comey.  In both cases, Trump has a perfect right to do either of these things because of his powers under Article II of the constitution.  Mueller wants to lay the case that Trump obstructed justice in the exercise of this constitutional powers, and that amounts to another constitutional crisis.  Even if this crisis gets resolved by the Supreme Court in Trump’s favor, that won’t happen until well after the 2018 mid-term elections.  Aside from that, the interview is a painfully obvious perjury trap, which Mueller has used repeatedly, throughout the investigation, and throughout his career.

Trey Gowdy has spent too much time as a prosecutor.  He implicitly believes in the good faith intentions of Robert Mueller in spite of all the contrary evidence.  It doesn’t enter his head that Mueller is a swamp creature par excellence that he is severely conflicted himself, that his prosecutorial team is conflicted, Gowdy can’t see the demonstrations of fascist thuggery exhibited by the investigation as in the case of Manafort and Cohen, Mueller’s utter failure to this point to investigate the origins of the Steele dossier and of the spying on the Trump campaign by the Obama administration, all the things that point to bad faith in the prosecutor.  Gowdy can’t see it.

Either Trey Gowdy has lost his legal mind, or he must be the worst defense attorney in Washington, D.C.