Mueller ‘100 percent’

GOP’s Gowdy says he supports Mueller ‘100 percent’

By PATRICK TEMPLE-WEST

A Republican member of the House Intelligence Committee said Sunday he supports special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s potential interference in the 2016 election and the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia.

Speaking on "Fox News Sunday," Rep. Trey Gowdy said he supports Mueller “100 percent.”

“I told my Republican colleagues, ‘Leave him the hell alone,’ and that’s still my advice,” Gowdy said.

Gowdy’s statement clashes with what some of his fellow House Republicans have said. In November, Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida called for Mueller to resign or be fired.

Gowdy also described the contents of a House Intelligence Committee memo that the Justice Department does not want to be released quickly. The memo allegedly reveals misconduct by senior Federal Bureau of Investigation officials involved in investigating President Donald Trump's campaign, and the committee could vote to release it as soon as Wednesday.

“This memo is nothing but the distilling, a reducing of thousands of pages of documents provided to us by the [Justice] Department and the bureau," Gowdy said. "There is nothing in this memo that the department is not already aware of.”

Questions are swirling about potential anti-Trump bias among some people who worked for Mueller last year. The Justice Department released to Congress several hundred anti-Trump text messages exchanged between two FBI officials.

Trump has long called the investigations into whether Russia meddled in the 2016 election “a witch hunt,” and, in December, his son Donald Trump Jr. told a crowd in Florida the probes were part of a “rigged system” by “people at the highest levels of government” who were working to hurt the president.

In December, former national security adviser Michael Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to investigators about his contact with foreign officials. The plea followed a similar deal cut by former campaign adviser George Papadopoulos in October, when former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and his deputy, Rick Gates, pleaded not guilty on charges including tax evasion.