Gowdy: Clinton Should Be Investigated, But We Haven’t Met the Threshold for Appointing a Special Counsel

On Wednesday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “America’s Newsroom,” House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chair and House Judiciary Committee member Representative Trey Gowdy (R-SC) argued that the threshold for appointing a special counsel to investigate Hillary Clinton hasn’t been reached, and the needed investigations into Clinton can be done without one.

Gowdy said, “Jim Jordan’s a great friend. I have tremendous respect for him. I did not sign the letter. Because I don’t think the threshold has been met for the appointment of special counsel. … You can investigate something without special counsel. In fact, 99.9% of all investigations in this country are done by the women and men at the Department of Justice and the US Attorney’s offices and none of them is called special counsel. So, there’s a threshold that has to be met, and I don’t think it has been met. So, to say we’re not going to appoint special counsel is not to say we’re not going to look into something.”

He added, “The fact that you believe something should be investigated — I agree with you. The fact pattern warrants investigation. The appointment of special counsel, when you hear special counsel, what you should hear in your head is, the current people we have, that we are paying to be federal prosecutors cannot do the job. Therefore, we need to go hire somebody who’s outside the Department of Justice, outside the US Attorney’s offices to do this job. It hasn’t worked well in the past. The jurisdiction gets expanded.”

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