How are we to view Trey Gowdy's take on the FBI and the Trump campaign?

He went on Martha McCallum's FNC show last evening and said the following:

“Based on what I have seen, I don't know what the FBI could have done or should have done other than run out a lead that someone loosely connected with the campaign was making assertions about Russia,” Gowdy continued. “I would think you would want the FBI to find out whether there was any validity to what those people were saying.”

Gowdy, who chairs the House Oversight Committee, was one of the congressional leaders briefed by the Department of Justice on the surveillance of Trump campaign associates last week. After the briefing, Gowdy says he is confident that Russia was the target of the investigation and not the Trump campaign itself. 

“I think the FBI, if they were at the table this morning, they would tell you that Russia was the target and Russia's intentions toward our country were the target,” Gowdy said. “The fact that two people who were loosely connected to the Trump campaign may have been involved doesn't diminish the fact that Russia was the target and not the campaign.”

In response to a question, Gowdy said that he doesn’t know why President Trump persists in using the term “spy” to describe the FBI informant. In his role as a prosecutor working with law enforcement, Gowdy said that he had never heard the word “spy” used to describe an informant.

“Under cover, informant, confidential informant, those are all words I'm familiar with, I've never heard the term spy used,” Gowdy said. 

Rep. Gowdy said that he doesn’t believe that President Trump has enough information about the investigation to understand the true aim of the probe. “I think his lawyers have an obligation to share with him what Devin [Nunes] and Paul [Ryan] and I saw last week,” Gowdy said. “I'm convinced when he sees it, he's going to say, 'you know what, that's what I told [James] Comey I wanted the FBI to do.” 

Gowdy said he believes that the president should agree to testify before Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation, saying, “He didn't collude with Russia, he doesn't know anything about it, and if anyone in his campaign did, he wants the public to know it, I think that's what he ought to tell Mueller.”

David Thornton at The Resurgent, whose report is excerpted here,  puts the onus on the president to bring clarity to all this:

So far, none of the congressional leaders briefed by the DOJ have backed President Trump’s claims that the FBI acted improperly. It is undisputed that the FBI investigated members of the Trump campaign, the questions are whether there was probable cause for them to do so and whether the surveillance was political in nature rather than a legitimate counterintelligence investigation. To date, the president has not supplied evidence that the surveillance was scandalous rather than necessary. 

Claims that the FBI investigation were used to undermine the Trump campaign seem implausible. Even though the Steele dossier was investigated in the summer of 2016, it was not public knowledge until after the election was over. Where the FBI did intervene to affect the election, Comey’s October memo to Congress, it was to Donald Trump’s benefit. 

President Trump has a duty to clarify his accusations against the FBI and the Department of Justice. If he has evidence of improper conduct, he should come forward with it. If he cannot provide evidence, he should stop publicly attacking and undermining America’s top law enforcement agency.

Andrew McCarthy at NRO sees it much differently:

Gowdy’s fire truck pulled into Fox News Tuesday night for an interview by Martha MacCallum. An able lawyer, the congressman is suddenly on a mission to protect the Justice Department and the FBI from further criticism. So, when Ms. MacCallum posed the question about the FBI spying on the Trump campaign, Gowdy deftly changed the subject: Rather than address the campaign, he repeatedly insisted that Donald Trump personally was never the “target” of the FBI’s investigation. The only “target,” Gowdy maintains, was Russia.

This is a dodge on at least two levels.

First, to repeat, the question raised by the FBI’s use of an informant is whether the bureau was investigating the Trump campaign. We’ll come momentarily to the closely connected question of whether Trump can be airbrushed out of his own campaign — I suspect the impossibility of this feat is why Gowdy is resistant to discussing the Trump campaign at all.

It is a diversion for Gowdy to prattle on about how Trump himself was not a “target” of the Russia investigation. As we’ve repeatedly observed (and as Gowdy acknowledged in the interview), the Trump-Russia probe is a counterintelligence investigation. An accomplished prosecutor, Gowdy well knows that “target” is a term of art in criminal investigations, denoting a suspect who is likely to be indicted. The term is inapposite to counterintelligence investigations, which are not about building criminal cases but about divining and thwarting the provocative schemes of hostile foreign powers. In that sense, and in no other, the foreign power at issue — here, Russia — is always the “target” of a counterintelligence probe; but it is never a “target” in the technical criminal-investigation sense in which Gowdy used the term . . . unless you think we are going to indict a country. 

Moreover, even if we stick to the criminal-investigation sense of "target," Gowdy knows it is misleading to emphasize that Trump is not one. Just a few short weeks ago, Gowdy was heard pooh-poohing as “meaningless” media reporting that Trump had been advised he was not a “target” of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe (which is the current iteration of the Russia investigation). As the congressman quite correctly pointed out, if Trump is a subject of the investigation — another criminal-law term of art, denoting a person whose conduct is under scrutiny, but who may or may not be indicted — it should be of little comfort that he is not a “target”; depending on how the evidence shakes out, a subject can become a target in the blink of an eye.

So, apart from the fact that Gowdy is dodging the question about whether the Trump campaign was being investigated, his digression about “targets” is gibberish. Since the Obama administration was using its counterintelligence powers (FISA surveillance, national-security letters, unmasking identities in intelligence reporting, all bolstered by the use of at least one covert informant), the political-spying issue boils down to whether the Trump campaign was being monitored. Whether Trump himself was apt to be indicted, and whether threats posed by Russia were the FBI’s focus, are beside the point; in a counterintelligence case, an indictment is never the objective, and a foreign power is always the focus.

Withholding Information from Trump

Second, if Gowdy has been paying attention, he must know that, precisely because the Trump campaign was under investigation, top FBI officials had qualms of conscience over Comey’s plan to give Trump a misleading assurance that he personally was not under investigation. If this has slipped Gowdy mind, perhaps Rubio could lend him the transcript of Comey’s testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee — in particular, a section Rubio seems not to remember, either. 

McCarthy makes it pretty clear that in the final days of the Obama administration, top officials were discussing whether there was any way to come up with a plausible reason to withhold information about the investigation from Trump.

It would be useful to hear Gowdy respond to this:

With due respect to Gowdy, the FBI did not regard Russia as the “target”; to the contrary, Comey said the focus of the investigation was whether Donald Trump’s campaign had coordinated in Russia’s election interference. And perspicaciously, Comey’s unidentified adviser connected the dots: Because (a) the FBI’s investigation was about the campaign, and (b) the campaign was Trump’s campaign, it was necessarily true that (c) Trump’s own conduct was under FBI scrutiny.

And this:

In the interview with Ms. MacCallum, Representative Gowdy further confused matters by stressing Trump’s observation, in a phone conversation with Comey on March 30, 2017, that it would be good to find out if underlings in his campaign had done anything wrong. This, according to Gowdy, means Trump should be pleased, rather than outraged, by what the FBI did: By steering an informant at three campaign officials, we’re to believe that the bureau was doing exactly what Trump suggested.

Such a specious argument. So disappointing to hear it from someone who clearly knows better.

First, the informant reportedly began approaching campaign officials in July 2016. It was nine months later, well after the election, when President Trump told Comey that if would be good if the FBI uncovered any wrongdoing by his “satellites.” Trump was not endorsing spying during the campaign; the campaign was long over. The president was saying that it would be worth continuing the FBI’s Russia investigation in order to root out any thus-far-undiscovered wrongdoing — but only if the FBI informed the public that Trump was not a suspect (an announcement Comey declined to make).

Second, Gowdy’s argument assumes something that is simply not true: namely, that the Trump campaign was not under investigation. As we’ve seen, Comey testified multiple times that the FBI was investigating the Trump campaign for possible coordination with Russia. The bureau was not, as Gowdy suggests, merely investigating a few campaign officials for suspicious contacts with Russia unrelated to the campaign. 

McCarthy reminds us that the FBI  / DoJ used the Steele dossier to obtain the FISA warrant. That would seem to cast a not-so-good light on Gowdy's take that that department / agency was merely acting upon facts that objective following of leads took them.

On the other hand, there's a whiff of inference in McCarthy's argument, sort of a "Oh, come on, we can see that Trump was personally being investigated" vibe.

McCarthy and Gowdy are both good men and experienced prosecutors who happen to vehemently disagree on this matter.

And then, of course, there's the Very Stable Genius himself, who began throwing around ill-advised terminology in his tweets about this from the get-go.

LITD says it's still premature to either howl "deep state witch hunt!" or assert in measured tones, "perfectly textbook following of investigative procedure."

Exactly how it all went down remains one of this universe's unsolved mysteries. It's full of those, and it behooves us to be okay with that.