Trey Gowdy to Congress: Focus on what Mueller ‘didn’t bother to look for’
July 31, 2019
Fox News contributor and former House Oversight Committee chairman Trey Gowdy had some advice for Congress ahead of Robert Mueller’s testimony last week: Focus on what Robert Mueller didn’tfind.
“Mueller found some things, you can go there. He didn’t find some things, you can go there,” Gowdy told Fox’s Sean Hannity the day before Mueller’s congressional hearings. “He didn’t bother to look for certain things, you can go there, and then you have the issue of the bias within the investigation.”
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Gowdy, who hasn’t shied away from commenting on allegations that President Donald Trump “colluded” with Russia and subsequently obstructed justice, went on to wonder “whether or not you can even obstruct an unpredicted investigation,” though “you can certainly resist an unlawful arrest,” he noted.
Gowdy: Mueller can’t change his tune
The former congressman said before the hearings that he didn’t think the American public would learn anything new when Mueller was questioned, and he appears to have been right. The only new information to come out of the hearings was that Mueller didn’t know his own report very well — and perhaps didn’t even write most of it himself.
But Gowdy told Hannity that Mueller really couldn’t have deviated from his report without facing his own repercussions. “Prosecutors are not supposed to deviate from their charging decision — or noncharging,” Gowdy said.
After all, the plain-talking former House member said, adding something new now would only raise more questions about the investigation than there were before.
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“Let’s assume he does say something new or different,” Gowdy suggested. “Your follow-up question is going to be, ‘[Why] the hell was that not your report?'”
The bottom line is, if Mueller had anything that would take President Trump down, his report would have surely included it. His team was packed with Democrats and Hillary Clinton supporters who wanted nothing more than to charge Trump with something — and get him booted out of the White House once and for all.
What Mueller “didn’t bother to look for”
The key thing to do in the hearings, Gowdy advised last week, was to focus on things Mueller “didn’t bother to look for,” such as the origin of the probe itself in June 2016. But although Mueller refused to answer Republicans’ questions about the origin of the investigation during the hearings, an ongoing counter-investigation should provide some of those answers soon.
The New York Times reports that special counsel John Durham is hard at work uncovering how exactly the investigation into alleged collusion between Trump and Russia got started. Among the questions he hopes to answer: Was the basis of the whole investigation a faked dossier full of inaccurate information?
With any luck, before too long, the Mueller farce will be exposed — and the American public will be asking the questions.
How will that fare for Democrats ahead of 2020? Only time will tell.