On Tuesday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “The Story,” House Oversight Committee Chair Representative Trey Gowdy (R-SC) said he’s bothered by the “amnesia” of people within the Trump orbit and urged everyone connected with his campaign to turn anything that has to do with Russia over to the special counsel because the slow drip is undermining the administration’s credibility.
Gowdy began by saying that he’d leave the question of the legality of Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with a Russian lawyer during the 2016 election up to special counsel Robert Mueller.
He added, “I’m troubled on three levels. Number one, the legal level, but I think that’s Bob Mueller’s lane. The political level, Martha, here we are, beginning another week, this one in July, with a new revelation about Russia. And then the third, which is more of a medical issue, is the amnesia of people that are in the Trump orbit. Someone close to the president needs to get everyone connected with that campaign in a room and say, from the time you saw ‘Dr. Zhivago’ until the moment you drag vodka with a guy named Boris, you list every single one of those, and we’re going to turn them over to the special counsel. Because this drip, drip, drip is undermining the credibility of this administration.”
Gowdy further stated, “I’m much more concerned about the purported reason for the meeting as opposed to the real reason. The purported reason was for an agent of a foreign power to try to influence our election. That concerns me more than someone trying to sit down with a member of perhaps an incoming administration to lobby for a policy change. I’m much more concerned with the actual words in the email than the real reason she wanted to meet.”
He also said that references to the Russian government’s support of the Trump campaign and official documents bothered him. Gowdy continued, “Those are the kind of words that, for months and months, Republicans have been saying, there is no evidence collusion between Trump, the Trump campaign, or even hangers-on. And here we have this meeting, that may amount to nothing, but here we are on a Tuesday, on a week we ought to be discussing infrastructure and tax reform, and we’re still talking about Russia. And frankly, with some good reason, because this email, we should have known about it before yesterday.”
(h/t Weekly Standard)
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett