‘TOO DAMN LATE’: Gowdy Shreds Comey After Former FBI Director Admits He Was Wrong About FISA Misconduct

Gowdy served for years as a federal prosecutor in South Carolina and then as district attorney for South Carolina’s Seventh Judicial Circuit. So he knows when people are lying.

The former South Carolina Republican lawmaker on Sunday shredded James Comey after the former FBI director acknowledged that he was completely wrong about the bureau’s wrongdoing in securing authority to conduct surveillance on members of the Trump campaign during the 2016 presidential campaign.

“This morning, Comey admitted he was wrong. Sometimes, Maria, it’s better late than never and sometimes it’s just too damn late,” Gowdy said in a Fox News with Maria Bartiromo. “Comey is about two years too late. We could have used his objectivity; we could have used him as head of the FBI helping Republicans figure out what was happening with FISA instead of thwarting us and obstructing us.”

“He said it was a policy and procedure issue. It’s not,” Gowdy said. “There have always has been policies against manufacturing evidence and withholding exculpatory evidence. That’s not new; those aren’t new policies. This is a personnel issue. It’s the wrong people in the wrong positions of power. That’s not goning be fixed with a new policy or procedure. It‘s going be fixed by replacing the people who did what they did in 2016.”

Comey appeared earlier in the day on Fox News, where he admitted the FBI made mistakes. He said the bureau displayed “real sloppiness” as top officials applied for warrants to keep spying on the Trump campaign. And he admitted he was “wrong” to about the process.  He had said in the past that he had “total confidence that the FISA process was followed and that the entire case was handled in a thoughtful, responsible way by DOJ and the FBI.”

But in his report, Department of Justice inspector general Michael Horowitz, who investigated the case, said ” We identified significant inaccuracies and omissions in each of the four applications, seven in the first application, and a total of 17 by the final renewal application.’

Fox News host Chris Wallace said to Comey: “Seventeen significant errors in the FISA process and you say that it was handled in a thoughtful and appropriate way.”

“He’s right. I was wrong,” Comey said. “I was overconfident in the procedures that the FBI and Justice had built over 20 years. I thought they were robust enough. It’s incredibly hard to get a FISA. I was overconfident in those. Because he’s right. There was real sloppiness, 17 things that either should’ve been in the applications or at least discussed and characterized differently. It was not acceptable and so he’s right. I was wrong.”

“But you make it sound like you’re a bystander, an eyewitness,” Wallace said. “You were the director of the FBI while a lot of this was going on.”

Comey also said it would have been “impossible” for him to know about the FISA application process “seven layers below” him.

“He said it was a policy and procedure issue, it’s not,” Gowdy said of Comey. “There have always been policies against manufacturing evidence and withholding exculpatory evidence. That’s not new. Those aren’t new policies. This is a personnel issue. It’s the wrong people in the wrong positions of power.”

 

by Eric A. Blair