Trey Gowdy to join Trump legal team in impeachment fight
Former Rep. Trey Gowdy has been tapped to join President Donald Trump’s legal team as the White House gears up for an impeachment battle with Congress.
“I am pleased to announce that former Congressman Trey Gowdy is joining our team as Counsel to the President,” Jay Sekulow, Trump’s personal attorney, confirmed in a statement on Wednesday night. “I have known Trey for years and worked with him when he served in Congress. His legal skills and his advocacy will serve the President well. Trey’s command of the law is well known and his service on Capitol Hill will be a great asset as a member of our team.”
Gowdy, who oversaw the investigation into the terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, as chairman of the House Benghazi Committee, is a Republican who represented South Carolina in Congress for four terms before retiring in 2019.
Fox News dropped Gowdy on Wednesday as a contributor after reports surfaced that he was likely to join Trump’s growing impeachment team, which includes Sekulow; former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani; Marc Mukasey, a Trump Organization lawyer and son of former Attorney General Michael Mukasey; and Trump lawyer William Consovoy.
In a recent appearance on Fox, Gowdy dismissed Giuliani’s efforts to dig up dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden’s family’s activities in Ukraine.
“Does any of that matter?” Gowdy told Fox News’ Dana Perino. “I mean, what is the theory under which it’s an impeachable offense? If the president asked Mayor Giuliani to do it, is that the impeachable offense?”
The former federal prosecutor went on to dismiss the transcript of Trump’s phone call with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine that was released by the White House, saying, “If there’s a smoking gun there, I can’t even find the gun, whether it’s smoking or not.”
The announcement of Gowdy’s hiring comes after the White House said it wouldn’t cooperate with House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry.
In a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the three committee chairmen leading the probe, White House counsel Pat Cipollone declared that the Trump administration would refuse to engage with a process it considers to be “constitutionally invalid” and “lacks any pretense of fairness.”
In 2016, Gowdy slammed the Obama White House for not handing over documents related to the multi-year investigation into the Benghazi attack.
“There continues to be time wasted negotiating with executive branch entities who do not want to give us what I believe Congress is entitled to,” Gowdy said about the Obama administration in 2016.
Gowdy concluded his investigation with an 800-page report that found no wrongdoing by Hillary Clinton, who was secretary of state at the time of the 2012 attack, which killed U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. The report, which Clinton’s 2016 campaign dismissed as “discredited” conspiracy theories, also said that the CIA missed the looming threat despite warnings and that it wrote faulty intelligence reports after the attack.
