Filling in for accused sexual harasser Sean Hannity on his primetime Fox “News” program Friday, former congressman Trey Gowdy–best known for his hair styles and the subject of an urban legend that he was the banjo player in the movie Deliverance–interviewed South Carolina republican Senator Lindsey Graham about the guilty plea of a lawyer in the Durham probe.
Former FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith is expected to plead guilty to making a false statement for altering a 2017 document used to extend a FISA warrant on former Trump campaign advisor Carter Page. At the time of the FISA warrant extension, Page was no longer with the campaign–and in fact, the campaign had been over for months–undermining President Trump’s claim that the Obama Administration “spied” on his campaign.
Graham called it “a great day for the rule of law.”
Unfortunately for Gowdy, people have not forgotten how he himself lied and falsified evidence in his most infamous investigation: the Benghazi hearings.
On October 7, 2015, Gowdy released a redacted letter he claimed Democratic presidential candidate and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton emailed from her private server. He also sent a 13-page letter to the senior Democratic member of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, Elijah Cummings.
https://youtu.be/gsC4kf6x_Q0?t=130
In the correspondence to Cummings, Gowdy claimed the redacted letter he included, in an unredacted version, was sent from Sidney Blumenthal, a former staffer for Clinton, to Clinton at her private email server, and that Clinton had forwarded the letter from her private email server to someone else.
This, Gowdy claimed, was a breach of national security because the non-redacted information contained the identify of a human intelligence asset, violating security clearance procedures.
Gowdy claimed, “This information, the name of a human source, is some of the most protected information in our intelligence community, the release of which could jeopardize not only national security but also human lives. Armed with that information, Secretary Clinton forwarded the email to a colleague–debunking her claim that she never sent any classified information from her private email address.”
Unfortunately for Gowdy, this was a lie. And it was a lie he fabricated.
No intelligence agency had redacted the name of the person in that email. Gowdy himself had done it, noting that the information was “[redacted due to sources and methods].”
The CIA had previously reviewed that email to Clinton and 126 other such correspondence. It advised the committee “The CIA reviewed the material in question and informed State that it required no redactions,” as Newsweek reported at the time.
In other words, the CIA didn’t make the redactions. Gowdy did. He altered the evidence to press the Benghazi investigation into Clinton’s emails.
Cummings called out Gowdy: “To further inflate your claim, you placed your own redactions over the name of the individual with the words, ‘redacted due to sources and methods.’ To be clear, these redactions were not made, and these words were not added, by any agency of the federal government responsible for enforcing classification guidelines.”
Then, like now, the reason Gowdy made the claim about Clinton was to deflect attention from a statement House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy had made admitting to the fact that the republican goals for the Benghazi hearings were to lower Clinton’s popularity before the election.
“Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee,” McCarthy said in September 2015. “What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she’s untrustable. But no one would have have known any of that had happened had we not fought and made that happen.”
Now, however, the false claims about Obama spying on the campaign, or about Biden’s mental acuity, Harris’s eligibility for the office or about Democrats sabotaging the election through the mail are being made to deflect from Trump’s failures in leadership. The lies Trump will state, republicans will repeat, and Fox “News” will broadcast will multiple.
They already have people like Trey Gowdy, Sean Hannity, and nearly the entire republican caucus who will willfully propagate those lies. They’re quite practiced in it.