Rep. Trey Gowdy is a hair more sophisticated than your typical Republican hack. He knows that if he pushes back just a tiny bit on his party’s attacks on the FBI and Justice Department, he’ll gain a little more credibility—with the “both sides do it” media, anyway—for his own attacks on Democrats. Gowdy is working hard to inoculate the Trump White House against charges of redacting parts of Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff’s response memo for political reasons:
“I think the Democrats are politically smart enough to put things in the memo that require either the bureau or the Department of Justice to say it needs to be redacted. Therefore, it creates this belief that there’s something being hidden from the American people,” Gowdy told Fox News’ Martha MacCallum.
“Unfortunately, we’re in an environment where you would include material that you know has to be redacted and you know responsible people are going to redact it just so that questions will be asked,” he added.
Yes, after Donald Trump released Rep. Devin Nunes’ memo without redactions, after a total sham of a review process, and over the objections of the FBI and Justice Department—after Trump said, while it was still supposedly being reviewed, that he was “100 percent” going to release it—and didn’t release the Democratic memo at the same time, it’s just outrageous to suggest that he might be making political decisions here to put out misleading information that’s convenient for him while hiding inconvenient information.
In Gowdy-land, it’s inconceivable that Democrats might have included the information they included in the memo because it was true and relevant. Everything must be an 11-dimensional-chess political decision where the use of information is to embarrass Trump when he hides it, not to, you know, increase transparency and defend the integrity of the investigation into—and let’s not forget what this is all about—Trump campaign collusion with Russia to interfere in the 2016 elections. If you think about it, Gowdy’s projection onto Democrats is telling us a lot about how he and his party operate.