Former South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy said he has “no idea” whether he will be needed by Trump’s private legal team given that he’s barred from communicating with anyone in Congress until January.
“I have no idea,” Gowdy responded after being asked whether he will be involved with the president’s legal team in January.
“I don’t know what, if anything, will exist in January. It may be over,“ he said. ”My sense is the president needs folks that can represent him now before the House, the Senate, and indirectly through television shows and print media.”
“For one year, I can’t talk to the House or Senate, and my reading of that statute, and it’s a restrictive reading I’ll grant you, but my reading is I can’t even communicate indirectly on behalf of a person with the intent to persuade,” Gowdy added about the lobbying rules.
“If Dallas doesn’t start playing better, I won’t be alive in January. So, I don’t know who I’ll be representing,” he joked.
Gowdy, 55, served as chairman of the House oversight committee from 2017. He did not seek reelection in the 2018 midterms after having represented South Carolina’s 4th Congressional District for eight years. He retired from Congress in January.
“Whatever skills I may have are better utilized in a courtroom than in Congress, and I enjoy our justice system more than our political system,” he said at the time.
Brennan questioned Gowdy as to why he would decide to engage in the impeachment inquiry, “one of the most divisive, vitriolic arguments that could be had” after signaling that he was tired of politics when he stepped down.
“To me, impeachment is the political death penalty,” Gowdy responded. “There’s a reason our country has never removed anyone from office. I look at it as a lawyer: What process is someone entitled to if you are seeking to remove him or her from office and assign to them a stigma that will echo through the halls of history? How much process is due?”
Brennan continued: “You’re talking about ‘process’ there, and that’s very specific here in terms of some of the criticisms from Republicans of this Democrat-led investigation.” She then played an excerpt from what Gowdy told her last year in April on the show. He said at the time: “Our private hearing was much more constructive than the public hearing. Public hearings are a circus, that’s why I don’t like to do them, I don’t do many of them, it’s a freakshow.”
“Do you still believe that?” she asked him.
Impeachment Process
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) have continued their impeachment inquiry largely behind closed doors, and rejected demands from House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) for a formal House vote to authorize an official impeachment procedure—something that has been done in all previous attempts to impeach a president.“You can’t pick and choose which aspects of due process you’re going to use,“ Gowdy told Brennan. ”It’s not just the privacy; the reason we respect executive branch investigations isn’t because they’re behind closed doors, it’s because there are no leaks.
“I mean, John Durham ... you have no idea what John Durham has been doing, you have no idea what Michael Horowitz is going to say in his FISA report, there were no leaks with Bob Mueller,” Gowdy said.
He added that he valued executive-branch investigations “because they’re fact-centric, because you wait until the end to draw conclusions, and because there are no leaks.
“It’s just not fair to do it on an hour-by-hour basis,” he said, referring to Adam Schiff’s House impeachment inquiry.
“So, I do understand the Republican frustration with the current investigation.”
A July 25 phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is currently the focus of an impeachment inquiry into Trump.
