Even Trey Gowdy Isn't Buying "Spygate"

Speaking of Trey Gowdy and also speaking of Donald Trump being an authoritarian nightmare cyclone...

Even Gowdy — the same Trey Gowdy who recently announced that he would not seek reelection after an inglorious Congressional tenure that included overseeing the Benghazi witch hunt, during which Hillary Clinton was grilled for 11 hours and which cost taxpayers nearly $8 million — refuses to indulge Trump's absurd "spygate" spin on the FBI working with informant Stefan Halper during the campaign, as part of an investigation into potential Russian collusion.

Samantha Schmidt at the Washington Post reports:

Outgoing Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), the House Oversight Committee chairman and a Trump supporter, said in an interview on Fox that the FBI was justified in using a secret informant to assist in the Russia investigation. Gowdy, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, attended a classified Justice Department briefing last week over the FBI's use of the confidential source, identified as Stefan A. Halper.

"[Donald] Trump himself in the Comey memos said if anyone connected with my campaign was working with Russia, I want you to investigate it, and it sounds to me like that is exactly what the FBI did," Gowdy told host Martha MacCallum. "I think when the president finds out what happened, he is going to be not just fine, he is going to be glad that we have an FBI that took seriously what they heard."

"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. Asked about the president's tweets on the subject, he added that such statements could be subject to questioning by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.

"If I were his lawyer, and I never will be, I would tell him to rely on his lawyers and his (communications) folks," he said.

I see what Trey Gowdy is trying to do there, appearing on Trump's favorite teevee channel to try to convince him to stop being an obvious despicable dipshit and instead at least try to pretend like he would be angry if the Russians infiltrated his campaign, rather than looking guilty AF by trying to impede an investigation that he claims would exonerate him.

Good luck with all that, Gowdy!

When Trey Gowdy becomes the voice of reason, your party has derailed. Flown off the tracks entirely. Crashed into a flammable liquid factory. Barreled through a lighted match warehouse. Blazed across the countryside. Careened over a cliff. Into an open hellmouth. https://t.co/IlpGoNqZB4

— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) May 30, 2018

Gowdy was, incredibly, backed up by Andrew Napolitano:

Asked to respond to Gowdy's remarks, a Fox News commentator known for defending the president also cast doubt on Trump's claims. Fox News legal analyst Andrew Napolitano (better known and often quoted by Trump as Judge Napolitano) said claims that the FBI placed an undercover spy on Trump's campaign "seem to be baseless."

"There is no evidence for that whatsoever," Napolitano said. The fact that the FBI source spoke with "people on the periphery of the campaign," he said, "is standard operating procedure in intelligence gathering and in criminal investigations."

Writes Schmidt: "Napolitano's reluctance to back Trump's claims was surprising in part because of Napolitano's previous tendency to peddle conspiracy theories with no evidence." LOL! Accurate. Hilarious, depressing, and accurate.

Gowdy and Napolitano are, of course, not the only Trump loyalists who think he's going too far, now that he's started to leave a bad taste even in mouths that have palated all the rest of his fetid authoritarian gruel. The problem is that they enabled and abetted him way the fuck past the point of too far a long time ago.

It's going to be tough to rein him in now.

But they know that. They're not trying to save us; they're just trying to save their own tattered reputations.