Donald Trump and his attack dogs, led by Rudy Giuliani, continue to insult the FBI, the Department of Justice and the intelligence of the American people with their claims that a spy had been “embedded” in the 2016 Trump campaign as part of a secret “Deep State” conspiracy to undermine a presidency and the Constitution.
In recent days, however, one of the loudest and most loyal of those attack dogs has fallen strangely silent. For months, U.S. Rep. Devin Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, has been a vocal proponent of these and other conspiracy theories, insisting that any day now, he was going to ferret out the evidence that he needed to prove them. As of last week, that evidence was supposedly going to come via a classified briefing in which Nunes would force top FBI and DOJ officials to come clean on how they had targeted Trump for destruction.
That top-secret briefing was held Thursday, and since then Nunes has gone silent. Now, thanks to U.S. Rep. Trey Gowdy, we know why.
Gowdy made his bones among conservatives with his relentless, highly partisan and ultimately unproductive hounding of Hillary Clinton over the Benghazi tragedy, so he’s not exactly known as a moderate. As chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Gowdy also attended last week’s FBI briefing alongside Nunes, and in an appearance Tuesday night on Fox News, he explained what he had learned.
The FBI and the Department of Justice have done everything by the book, acting professionally and appropriately, Gowdy told the Fox News audience. They had information that Russia was attempting to penetrate the Trump campaign, and they responded to that information just as they should have.
“President Trump himself, in the Comey memos, said if anyone connected with my campaign was working with Russia, I want you to investigate it, and it sounds to me like that is exactly what the FBI did,” Gowdy said. “I think when the president finds out what happened, he is going to be not just fine, he is going to be glad that we have an FBI that took seriously what they heard. He was never the target; Russia was the target.”
In fact, after the briefing, “I am even more convinced that the FBI did exactly what my fellow citizens would want them to do when they got the information they got, and that it has nothing to do with Donald Trump,” Gowdy said.
When asked whether Trump should sit down for an interview with special counsel Robert Mueller, Gowdy all but pleaded with the president to do so.
“You’ve told us publicly there was no collusion. You’ve told us publicly there was no obstruction. Say in private what you’ve said publicly. Limit the scope to exactly what the Mueller memo is, but if he were my client, and you say you’ve done nothing wrong, then you need to sit down and tell Mueller what you know.”
Later, similar sentiments were shared by Andrew Napolitano, a prominent Fox News “legal analyst” with his own history of promoting conspiracy theories. He has claimed, for example, that the government is lying to us about what really happened on Sept. 11, and that Barack Obama asked Great Britain to wiretap the Trump campaign, a charge that he later had to admit was groundless.
But even for Napolitano, Trump’s “SpyGate” accusations are over the top.
“The allegations by Mayor Giuliani over the weekend, which would lead to us believe that the Trump people think that the FBI had an undercover agent who inveigled his way into the campaign and was there as a spy on the campaign, seem to be baseless,” Napolitano admitted, calling FBI techniques in the case “standard operating procedure in intelligence gathering and in criminal investigations.”
“If (the FBI) were there for some nefarious reason -- the one Giuliani suggested, to gather data on the campaign and then pass it to (the Obama White House) and pass it to Mrs. Clinton -- I would want to see evidence of that before I made an allegation that outrageous,” Napolitano concluded.
That’s really something. We have a president of the United States trying to sell a conspiracy theory so whacked out and so utterly without basis that even partisans as fervent as Gowdy and Napolitano feel compelled to call it out. And the question that you have to ask yourself is why.
According to Gowdy, Trump ought to be welcoming this investigation. “I would think everybody would want to know, what did Russia do?” as the congressman put it. Yet Trump quite clearly does not welcome the probe and does not want us to know. He wants it ended and ended now.
Why?
As an innocent man, Gowdy said, Trump “absolutely” ought to sit down with Mueller to clear up any remaining questions, yet Trump and his legal staff are inventing lame excuse after lame excuse to avoid doing that.
Why?
And instead of simply telling the truth, the president and his lackeys have concocted a story that is “baseless” and”outrageous,” as Napolitano put it, with “no evidence whatsoever” to support it.
Why? I can’t think of an innocent explanation for any of it.
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