Trey Gowdy: Brennan was either inaccurate or incompetent!"

What was the most important event to happen today? John Brennan was interviewed today by John Durham. Gowdy: "My suspicion is that John Brennan knew exactly what was happening exactly when it was happening!"

"When we had power and didn't use it!"

Sebastian Gorka has Matt Gaetz on his podcast/radio show. It doesn't put Trey Gowdy in a good light. Begin watching at the 3-minute mark unless you want to begin listening earlier when Sidney Powell alleges that the illegal spying and leaking goes all the way up to Obama.

Trey Gowdy joins Trump legal team

Guess who is no longer with Fox News? Trey Gowdy! Where is he going? Trump's legal team! Do you suppose he might help a bit with impeachment hearings?
Read more here.

Exculpatory and Inculpatory

Who paid him off?

What a huge lesson! Conservatives stand for freedom, courage, virtue, beauty, and, most of all, truth. We know we should not put our total faith in any one man or woman, because that's a sure way to arrive at disappointment. Many conservatives put their faith in Trey Gowdy, because he was such a good questioner of phony people like Hillary Clinton. Now many of us are waking up to the fact that putting faith in Trey Gowdy was a huge mistake.



Mollie Hemingway writes in The Federalist,

Trey Gowdy Didn’t Even See Documents He Claims Exonerate FBI On Spygate!

Gowdy claimed that the FBI's use of spies against the Trump campaign was perfectly proper, but multiple reports indicate he never even saw the full records Congress subpoenaed on the matter.

Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) recently suggested the FBI did nothing wrong when it used at least one government informant to secretly collect information on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Public reports indicate, however, that Gowdy never even reviewed the relevant documents on the matter subpoenaed by Congress. In fact, a spokeswoman for Gowdy told The Federalist that the congressman doesn’t even know what documents and records were subpoenaed by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI).

The briefing Gowdy and other lawmakers attended was scheduled at the behest of the White House after the Department of Justice (DOJ) obstructed the subpoena. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein likened HPSCI’s constitutionally obligated congressional oversight of DOJ to “extortion.”

Although Gowdy intimated that the information he received in a briefing last week made clear the FBI did nothing wrong, numerous reports from multiple news outlets indicated that the lawmakers DOJ invited to the briefing were not given access to all of the records HPSCI subpoenaed. Other comments Gowdy made during recent television interviews raise questions about how firm a grasp he has on the investigation and concerns the investigation has raised.

The May 24 briefing was held after tensions flared over the Justice Department’s refusal to comply with the congressional subpoena. DOJ initially claimed President Trump backed its obstruction efforts, a charge refuted by the White House and President Trump himself.

According to government sources who leaked information to The New York Times and Washington Post, the subpoena dealt with an individual who was secretly gathering information on the Trump campaign on behalf of the federal government. Media outlets had reported government officials’ claims they couldn’t comply with the subpoena because revealing any details about the individual would cause loss of life and grave threats to national security. The same media outlets then used leaks from government officials to report the individual’s personally identifying information — up to and including his name.

Along with Gowdy, HPSCI Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) received a classified briefing on the subpoenaed information. Seven other members of Congress did as well. However, multiple press reports indicate the classified briefings reportedly did not satisfy the subpoena.

“Sources tell me Gowdy and Nunes did not receive the documents they requested during the noon meeting at DOJ, despite pleas for openness from [White House chief of staff John] Kelly and [Trump attorney Emmett] Flood,” CNN reporter Sarah Westwood wrote.

...Whether or not you call informants on criminal investigations spies, there is no doubt that you refer to secret government operatives in counterintelligence investigations as spies. Regardless, arguments over whether use of the word “informant” is for some reason preferable to the word “spy” are entirely semantic and don’t speak to whether government agents sending someone undercover to extract information from the Trump campaign was an abuse of power.

Gowdy, who has repeatedly praised Special Counsel Robert Mueller and said he should be allowed to complete his criminal and counterintelligence investigations unimpeded, also admitted he didn’t know the scope of the Mueller probe.

Bret Baier, Trey Gowdy, Jim Comey

Do you want to see Jim Comey squirm? Do you want to see an actual journalist at work? Watch this interview Bret Baier conducted with James Comey. The squirming begins in earnest at the fifteen minute mark in this tape.



Here is Trey Gowdy's reaction to the Comey intervew with Bret Baier. Trey Gowdy has read the application to the FISA court and he says the dossier was an indispensible part of the application. Who is lying, Gowdy or Comey? I say Comey!



Here is Bret Baier on what he takes away from the interview. Comey says he still doesn't know which Democrat(s) funded the dossier.

Questions, but no answers!

I watched only the first segment of this show in which Congressman Gowdy answered questions from Chris Wallace. Did Justice or Intelligence agencies rely on the dossier in initiating the counterintelligence investigation or in court filings? If they relied on that dossier and they didn't corroborate or vet it that's gonna be the next thing House Intel will investigate. We've still got a lot of Obama holdovers in the Department of Justice. Or should I say Holderovers?

No one can remember who paid ten million dollars to a law firm to do oppo research! Two issues: memory, and lack of transparency through a law firm.

Is anyone else getting tired of all the excuses?

"the felonious dissemination of classified information"

Trey Gowdy wants to bring back Comey and Rogers on Tuesday to talk about the political use of the unmasking of US citizens. But, then he appears to contradict himself at the end, when he asks why these investigations must be conducted in public!

12 million minus one, minus two, minus three...

Trey Gowdy for Attorney General?

Donald Trump tweeted today that he wants Trey Gowdy to be his Attorney General. That would please a lot of conservatives.
Read more here.

It's a shame that Congressmen are limited to five minutes of questioning.

And no follow up questions based on the answers given.

Trey Gowdy endorses Rubio

Trey Gowdy is going to be campaigning in Iowa next week for Marco Rubio. At Breitbart Julie Hahn examines in great detail Gowdy's record on illegal immigration and the fast track trade agreement.

Trey Gowdy’s record on immigration and trade underscores that while establishment media may try to put Jeff Sessions and Trey Gowdy together in a broad “conservative” bucket, Gowdy’s statements on immigration and trade represent the antithesis of Jeff Sessions’ populist platform.

...According to Pew, 92 percent of the GOP electorate—and 83 percent of the American electorate as a whole—would like to see future immigration growth curbed rather than increased. The polling data suggests that Gowdy, Rubio, and Ryan’s support for higher rates of foreign worker importations places them far outside the mainstream of Republican thought. Yet despite the data, one hill operative put it to Breitbart News thusly: “The clique running the show in Congress are the Ryan-Rubio radical Republicans.”

As Rush Limbaugh warned earlier this year, with Rubio in the White House and Paul Ryan as Speaker, in the “first 12-to-18 months, the donor-class agenda is implemented, including amnesty and whatever else they want.”

Breitbart News asked Gowdy several questions about his endorsement and the expected impact a President Rubio would have on the nation’s immigration policies. Gowdy’s office has not responded.

Read much more here.

"This investigation is about four people who were killed representing our country on foreign soil."

Trey Gowdy's opening statement in today's Benghazi hearing.

"Facts we could not ignore"

Guy Benson at Town Hall provides us with a pdf of a letter written by Trey Gowdy to Elijah Cummings, the ranking minority member on the House Select Committee on Benghazi. Gowdy confronted Cummings for

acting on duties "not to the American public, but to your Democrat colleagues and to the administration, including former Secretary Clinton," adding that he's disappointed in the Democrat's "complete lack of interest in gathering any facts."

There are many points Gowdy makes that I wanted to excerpt, but my Blogger equipment was unable to copy and paste from the pdf document. Read the whole document here.

To me, the contrasting behavior of Gowdy and Cummings offers a perfect microcosm revealing the differences between the quality of the people in the Democrat and Republican parties.

Benson concludes,

Gowdy alerts Cummings that the committee "plans on releasing these new emails" next week and plans on questioning Mrs. Clinton about their contents on October 22. Stay tuned.

Read more here.

The professionalism of the Benghazi committee

Excerpts of a column Kimberley A. Strassel writes in the Wall Street Journal:

Kevin McCarthy unexpectedly withdrew from the House speaker’s race on Thursday, a casualty of a fractured Republican conference. The Californian didn’t do much to inspire confidence last week when he suggested that the House Benghazi committee had been designed to attack Hillary Clinton.

One pity of the McCarthy comments is that they tainted the committee’s work with politics. The bigger pity is that they are dead wrong. South Carolina Republican Trey Gowdy is 18 months into the committee that the House purpose-built to investigate the 2012 terrorist assault in Libya that killed four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens. His Benghazi investigation has been a model of seriousness, professionalism and discreetness.

The statistics alone bear this out. The committee has so far reviewed 50,000 new pages of documents. Less than 5% have anything to do with Mrs. Clinton’s work as secretary of state. It has interviewed 51 witnesses. Forty-one of those were brand-new—no committee had bothered to speak with them before, though seven were eyewitnesses to the attack.

...Keeping the Benghazi committee on the straight and narrow hasn’t been fun. Democrats work with Mr. Gowdy in private but then berate his committee in public. Conservative activists and talk-radio hosts blast him for depriving them of the drama they crave—for not running a get-Hillary committee. The State Department blocks him. And now his own side has made his job that much harder.

Don’t expect Mr. Gowdy to give up. He has run his committee with one goal in mind: finding answers for the families of four dead Americans. Mrs. Clinton flatters herself if she thinks it’s all about her.

Read more here.

Trey Gowdy questions Planned Parenthood's leader

Will Republicans take the bait?

Jonah Goldberg writes at National Review,

A truly sociopathic liar (though his sociopathologies hardly end there), Clinton has a gift for making other people feel like there is something wrong with them for objecting to his deceptions.

Are you familiar with the term "gaslighting?" Goldberg uses it when writing about Bill Clinton. From Wikipaedia:

Sociopaths frequently use gaslighting tactics. Sociopaths consistently transgress social mores, break laws, and exploit others, but typically, are also charming and convincing liars who consistently deny wrongdoing. Thus, some who have been victimized by sociopaths may doubt their perceptions.

Goldberg continues,

Clinton’s sexual exploits were only one facet of his full-spectrum gaslighting of America. He sold pardons. He sold the Lincoln bedroom. He lied and cheated in innumerable ways, large and small, and he successfully made the people who objected, or even pointed out the truth, seem like the weird ones.

Hillary Clinton recognized that her ambitions could only be realized by hitching herself to her sociopath husband. No doubt that decision had its downsides, but look where she is now. Let’s not pretend she didn’t make peace with her husband’s ways a long, long, time ago. She was happy to make $100,000 on cattle futures, after all. When the Clintons left office they created a “foundation” whose chief purpose was to give form and function to House Clinton, a modern day version of a medieval aristocracy. The House of Medici did many good things. They fed the poor. They built cathedrals. But their good works were the price of power, not the purpose of the power. The Clinton Foundation does some good things, I’m sure. But the charitable work should be seen for what it is: the cost of business. Mob bosses buy ice cream cones for poor kids. When Marlo Stanfield becomes the big man in The Wire, he’s quick to have his goons hand out money to the school kids for new clothes.

...the Clintons are so good at corrupting liberals to their cause and gaslighting everyone else who objects.

...As Alexander Solzhenitsyn said, “Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.”

If Hillary Clinton wanted these e-mails out ASAP, she would not have printed them out and delivered hard copies — some double-sided, some not, for extra inconvenience — to the State Department. She would have handed over an easily searchable hard drive. Heck, she still has electronic versions of the e-mails. She could hand them over today if she wanted to expedite the process. But that’s not the plan.

...She really does want these e-mails out. Why? Because the damning ones were already destroyed. This shouldn’t be so complicated, and yet I keep hearing useful idiots suggest that Hillary will be “exonerated” when the State Department finally releases the scrubbed e-mails. If you’ve destroyed incriminating evidence, releasing the non-incriminating evidence is a good thing. After all, there’s a little-known codicil to the doctrine of Occam’s razor: When a Clinton says, “There is no evidence I did X,” the most reasonable conclusion is that the evidence of X was “handled.”

This was Clinton’s plan all along. Already her flacks and hacks have been trying valiantly to redefine the controversy over her stealth server into a more vague and generic controversy over her “e-mails.” The hope was that by the time the State Department released her sanitized correspondence in January of 2016, people would forget about the details — if they ever knew about them in the first place. The specific lies would get airbrushed out of the story and all that would remain would be some vague controversy about her e-mails. Then — voila — they’re released and there’s no there there. “No smoking gun!” and “exonerated!” punctuate the Sunday shows.

The larger lesson remains: The Clintons are artists at telling lies — Bill by natural talent, Hillary by years of practice and studying her savant husband — and their preferred medium for telling lies is the truth. They take truths and yoke them to the service of lies.

I gather that the people who need to yank aquatic-craniate animals out of the water to justify their daytime drinking habits use lots of different kinds of bait depending on the circumstances. The Clintons have many kinds of bait at their disposal as well. The trick for Republicans is to recognize as many of the different lures in their tackle box as possible. It’s worth recalling that even Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, was not immune to being baited by his enemies.

...a good alternative would be for Gowdy to ask all the questions. He has a prosecutor’s gift for interrogation. He knows the material. He could ask crisp, factual questions that build a case and expose weaknesses in Clinton’s testimony. And, he’s probably immune to Hillary’s well-honed gaslighting techniques. It’s easy to seem like a victim — ironically one of Hillary’s favorite roles, given her claims of being an empowered, independent woman — when a bunch of blowhard politicians are mugging for the cameras and mansplaining away.

Read more here.

Trey Gowdy, where are you?

Andrew McCarthy wants to know why, given the evidence of her obstructing the investigation,
the Benghazi Committee has not asked for Hillary to testify publicly.

There is now significant evidence that Mrs. Clinton has been obstructing congressional investigations into the Benghazi massacre for well over two years. As Chairman Gowdy also told Ms. Van Susteren, congressional committees put Mrs. Clinton and the State Department on notice in the weeks immediately following the terrorist attack on September 12, 2012, that all relevant records should be preserved. Clearly, Mrs. Clinton had such records and improperly withheld them: Even by her own very suspect account, she finally surrendered Benghazi-related e-mails to the State Department in late 2014 (from among the thousands of e-mails she concealed on her private server after leaving the government nearly two years earlier).

A good investigator is not indulgent of a recalcitrant witness who is making a mockery of the investigative process. He uses the tools the law gives him to make it crystal clear that that he is not running a kangaroo court. He makes certain that witnesses and the public understand that the law requires compliance with congressional-committee demands for information. This shouldn’t be a case of Gowdy asking Clinton to please do him a favor.

Mrs. Clinton’s testimony should be public. The Benghazi congressional investigation is a public-accountability investigation. In the absence of compelling needs for secrecy, it must be public. There is no good reason to extend the courtesy of a private interview to a former government official who is already known to have made extraordinary efforts to conceal her official government communications from the public.

Mrs. Clinton is a lawyer and she has highly capable legal representation. If a committee question to her implicates a legally cognizable privacy interest, she will have no trouble claiming her privilege at that time. Furthermore, it must be remembered that it is she who, though a public official, chose to commingle her private and official communications against federal law, regulations, and practice. Consequently, she is in a far poorer position than the ordinary witness to complain about invasions of privacy.

In the matter of Mrs. Clinton’s e-mails, the national-security concerns are even less compelling than usual, for two reasons. First, Mrs. Clinton has publicly represented that she did not keep classified documents or other classified information on her private server. If she is telling the truth, there is no national-security basis for avoiding public testimony. And even if she is not telling the truth, the fact remains that she chose to maintain a private communications system outside the government system’s protections against hacking and espionage. Foreign-intelligence services and hostile groups with cyber-spying capabilities have already been able to penetrate her communications, so it’s a tad late in the day to worry about that.

...Every seasoned prosecutor knows that in every investigation that touches on politics, partisans who stand to be embarrassed or accused of wrongdoing attempt to undermine the investigation by carping that it is politically motivated. That comes with the territory. The investigator’s job is to tune out that noise and proceed with the case. In the end, what the public is going to care about is the evidence and whether the witness’s explanations for her actions make sense. The investigator’s motivations for seeking the evidence will be beside the point as long as the evidence is obviously germane to the investigation. What people remember is what was on Nixon’s tapes, not that committee Democrats had an obvious political motivation to seek them.

For the chairman to continue making self-defeating accommodations in the hope that this dynamic will change is not merely futile; it is now badly hurting an investigation that has already floundered for ten months. It is way beyond time for Mr. Gowdy to stop worrying about what Mrs. Clinton’s pom-pom squad will say about his investigative tactics. It is time to stop talking about making a vigorous public case and start making a vigorous public case.

Read more here.

Hillary toys with the Benghazi select committee

Andrew McCarthy, who excoriated Trey Gowdy is a recent post, has a new one entitled Don't Blame Gowdy. McCarthy points out that the Select Committee on Benghazi, headed by Gowdy,

is powerless to obtain search warrants and coerce the physical surrender of evidence. Simply stated, the committee is not a prosecutor.

Congress has no authority to conduct criminal investigations or to seize evidence. Those are police powers and they belong solely to the executive branch.

...Congress is neither intended nor equipped to compel production of evidence, investigate crime, and prove guilt.

I believe I have been harder on the Benghazi select committee than any conservative commentator (see here, here and here). That is largely because I admire Representative Gowdy, was very happy to see the committee placed in such capable hands, and have been disappointed at its lethargic approach to an urgent matter. This, however, has never been to overlook that the committee has a very difficult job.

Not only are there political pressures to bury Benghazi and the disastrous bipartisan policy decisions that led to it. It is also simply very difficult for a congressional committee to investigate government misconduct. It has a much harder time coercing cooperation than a prosecutor does — especially when at least half the Congress is undermining the investigation.

My objection is that, just as the public and the commentariat seem confused about what the committee is for and what it can do, so does the committee. Chairman Gowdy is determined to run the case like a criminal investigation, but it is not one. It is a public-accountability investigation. It is not legal but political in nature – and I mean “political” not in the pejorative sense of partisanship but in the classic sense of accountability for the misuse and abuse of political power.

...For ten months, the committee takes virtually no action and conveys the impression that it is not exactly tripping over itself to get to the bottom of Benghazi. There are nearly no hearings – the ones that have been held have been desultory and mostly irrelevant to the main issues. The public may be forgiven if it forgot that there was a congressional Benghazi investigation, much less that anyone in Washington still thinks it worth examining the government actions that both created conditions inviting the terrorist murder of four American officials and then covered up what happened.

...Republicans, meantime, have forfeited the power of the purse for this year. They will not even consider impeaching officials who abdicated their duty to protect and defend Americans and then studiously defrauded the public about the cause of the attack. They continue to rubber-stamp Obama appointees. Indeed, as Betsy McCaughey points out, they overwhelmingly confirmed a secretary of state who told them he would not adhere to the Constitution’s treaty requirements; and now, they are poised to confirm as attorney general — the nation’s top law-enforcement officer — a nominee who has told them she supports the president’s unconstitutional amnesty order and his non-enforcement of federal law.

Obviously, most of us want the Benghazi select committee to succeed; while skeptical and impatient, we’re willing to assume that the committee wants to succeed. But if Chairman Gowdy and his committee are ever to get to the bottom of Benghazi, everyone needs to stop agitating over executive police powers they do not have and start demanding that they use the powerful tools the Constitution has actually given to Congress.

Read more here.

One person does not make law in a republic!

"The end does not justify the means, no matter how good the intentions. ...I promise you this, there will come a day where you will cry out for the enforcement of the law.


Thanks to Adrienne's Corner