Former Rep. Trey Gowdy said he does not expect prosecutions in U.S. Attorney John Durham’s review of the Russia investigation.
As allies of President Trump demand justice for the people they believe were unfairly prosecuted in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, Gowdy, a former federal prosecutor, said accountability should not be inextricably tied to criminal charges.
“No ma’am,” the South Carolina Republican said when asked Friday by Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum whether he believes there will be prosecutions in Durham’s inquiry into possible misconduct by federal law enforcement and counterintelligence officials.
“We have got to not only associate accountability with prosecutions,” Gowdy added after mentioning he had just spoken to another former federal prosecutor. “I don’t think it — I think being a terrible FBI agent and treating people unfairly, maybe it ought to be a crime, but I don’t think it is a crime. The takeaway is, the next time the FBI says, ‘Hey, we’d like to talk,’ tell them no. Say, ‘When you clean up your act, when you quit trying to get people fired and see what you can get away with, we will start treating you like a dispassionate law enforcement agency, but until then, no thanks we’re done talking with you.'”
Attorney General William Barr, who tasked Durham with the review, recently said he was “very troubled” by what the Connecticut prosecutor has found. Asked by radio host Hugh Hewitt when an announcement about Durham’s work might happen, Barr said it would be “as soon as we feel we have something that we are confident in to tell the people about.”
Gowdy spoke after the release of FBI notes that lawyers for retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn argue are proof the FBI unfairly treated their client. Flynn, who was briefly Trump’s first national security adviser, pleaded guilty to lying to agents about his communications with a Russian envoy but is now trying to get the case dismissed.
Gowdy told Fox News earlier in the week that he believes the FBI sprung a “gotcha investigation” on Flynn by failing to follow proper procedure when they interviewed him about his conversation with a Russian envoy in January 2017. He also characterized the actions of James Comey, who was the FBI director at the time of the interview, as reckless, referring to Comey’s public admission that he took advantage of the chaos in the early days of Trump’s administration when he sent FBI agents to talk to Flynn.
“This is not the way law enforcement officers proceed,” Gowdy said. “It’s not the department of ‘let’s see if we can get away with it.’ Remember, Jim Comey told that giggling gaggle of liberals at that little interview he had, ‘I did it because I could get away with it.'”
