Adam Schiff: Trey Gowdy lied, but 'he sounds a bit different now that he wants to be a judge'
Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., tore into colleague Rep. Trey Gowdy, accusing the South Carolina Republican of lying about the House Intelligence Committee's memo on alleged government surveillance abuses.
One day after Gowdy singled out the top Democrat on the intelligence panel for criticism, Schiff suggested that Gowdy only recently has tamped down his rhetoric because "he wants to be a judge." During an interview Monday evening on MSNBC, Schiff blamed Gowdy, along with House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., for trying to justify the "blatantly false statement" made by President Trump when he tweeted last year that he learned that former President Barack Obama wiretapped Trump tower to spy on him. After host Chris Hayes noted that another Democratic member of the panel, Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., called Nunes a liar, Schiff funneled the majority of his ire toward Gowdy. "Well, yes. This is a false, patently false, provably false statement. But not just by Nunes," Schiff said, before turning his focus to the memo on Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants used to spy on Trump campaign aide Carter Page.
"Others signed off on it, too, like Trey Gowdy, and indeed the entire majority signed off on that Nunes memoranda. Now, Nunes hadn't read the FISA," he continued, referring to Nunes' admission following the February release of the memo that he did not read the underlying intelligence. "So he signed off on it blindly. But Trey Gowdy had read it. Trey Gowdy knew it was false, these arguments they were making, but nonetheless pushed forward. Now, he sounds a bit different now that he wants to be a judge. But that's no forgiving those misrepresentations and the denigration of the Justice Department, of the intelligence community, all in this misguided effort to defend the president whatever the cost may be." Schiff said in the GOP memo Republicans "cherry-picked" information to fit their narrative and posited that the more than 400 pages of highly redacted, top-secret documents released by the Justice Department late Saturday evening related to the 2016 application for the FISA warrant taken out on Page, in addition to three renewal applications, resulted in "a little additional damage."