The Knights of Trumplandia
by digby
What won’t they do for Emperor Trump?
Rep. Trey Gowdy has been a pitbull investigator for Republicans for years. Now, he’s in President Donald Trump’s doghouse for daring to challenge the president’s unsupported claim that Democrats and their sympathizers in the FBI embedded a spy in his 2016 campaign.
Trump allies have been pummeling Gowdy in recent days, branding him a gullible or clueless backer of the intelligence community. Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, labeled him “uninformed.” Another Trump-tied attorney, Victoria Toensing, said Gowdy “doesn’t know diddly-squat” about the particulars of federal investigations. And Fox News host Lou Dobbs tagged him a “RINO” — a term for a fake Republican.
It’s the latest twist in Gowdy’s enigmatic tenure in Congress. Once a conservative hero for his headline-grabbing inquisitions of the Obama administration — over the “Fast and Furious” gun-running program and alleged IRS targeting of conservatives, as well as his highly charged Benghazi probe — Gowdy has also bedeviled partisans by sometimes refusing to toe a pro-Trump line. At times, Trump himself has seemed perplexed; in the span of two years, the president once hailed Gowdy as a brilliant lawmaker before bashing him as a failure and then embracing him once again.
Now, after years shouldering the House GOP’s weightiest and most politically explosive investigations, he’s again drawn the ire of Trump-world. And this time, he’s virtually alone, getting little support from his House colleagues.
The retiring South Carolina Republican’s emergence as a critic of Trump’s conspiracy theory began Tuesday, when Gowdy went on Fox News to discuss his takeaway from a classified Justice Department briefing last week about the president’s claims.
Gowdy insisted that the FBI did not, in fact, plant a spy in the Trump camp for political purposes. Rather, he said, the FBI appropriately deployed an informant to glean intelligence from members on the outer edge of Trump’s campaign. The FBI had received troubling evidence that those individuals had suspect ties to Russia, and the bureau had been obligated to pursue those legitimate leads, Gowdy said. The briefing, for only a select group of nine senior lawmakers of both parties, only bolstered his position, he said.
“I am even more convinced that the FBI did exactly what my fellow citizens would want them to do when they got the information they got — and that it has nothing to do with Donald Trump,” Gowdy said in the interview.
The comments soon earned him punishing rebukes from Trump’s most vocal allies. Fox’s Sean Hannity said Wednesday that “Trey Gowdy doesn’t get it.” Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, father of White House press secretary Sarah Sanders, distributed a 950-word treatise Friday questioning Gowdy’s position. And Dobbs said Gowdy appeared to be auditioning for a job after he leaves Congress.
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The episode isn’t the first time Gowdy has ended up frustrating Trump’s circle. House conservatives, Trump allies and even Trump himself blasted Gowdy in June 2016 for declining to issue a harsher indictment of Hillary Clinton’s role in the Benghazi attacks that left four Americans dead in 2012.
Trump, who in 2014 praised Gowdy’s ascension to lead the Benghazi probe as a “great decision,” has had a seesawing relationship with the soft-spoken South Carolinian in recent years. In July 2015, Trump tweeted a supporters’ suggestion that Gowdy become his attorney general. But he soured on him in late 2015, when Gowdy endorsed his primary rival Sen. Marco Rubio. “I hope @TGowdySC does better for Rubio than he did at the #Benghazi hearings, which were a total disaster for Republicans & America!” he tweeted at the time.
But by mid-2016, Trump was ready to embrace Gowdy again after earning his endorsement. “Thank you for your wonderful endorsement today @TGowdySC. It means a great deal to me,” Trump tweeted at the time. “We will not disappoint!”
Gowdy revealed in a CBS interview on Wednesday that he has “never met or talked to” Trump, a startling fact for a senior lawmaker who has had an outsize role in the House for years. Meanwhile, Trump approvingly quoted comments Gowdy made about Attorney General Jeff Sessions in a series of tweets Wednesday.
But that didn’t stop the onslaught of attacks on Gowdy from Trump’s most vocal allies. “He’s drinking the Kool-Aid,” Giuliani said of Gowdy in a CNN interview, before saying Gowdy “screwed up” on Benghazi.
Huckabee said Gowdy seemed to unquestioningly accept the Justice Department’s briefing on the FBI informant. “Such credulity seems strangely out of character for someone like Gowdy, a seasoned prosecutor who knows better than to believe people who continue to hide mountains of evidence,” Huckabee wrote.
This is sick. Gowdy is anything but a left wing toady and they know it. But they are demonstrating that if you defy their king they will descend like a pack of rabid wolves.