House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) says his committee will soon subpoena former FBI counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok if FBI leadership refuses to make him available to Congress.
Goodlatte appeared on Fox News’ Special Report with House Oversight Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) Thursday evening to discuss Inspector General Michael Horowitz’ report on the FBI’s handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation.
The committees will hold a joint hearing next Tuesday to question Horowitz about his findings. Goodlatte said they have also requested that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher Wray testify the following week.
“Why is it our job to prove that Strzok’s bias impacted his decision making?” Gowdy asked, referring to the IG’s finding that there was “no documentary or testimonial evidence directly connecting” the anti-Trump political views of FBI investigators to “specific investigative decisions.”
“I got a better idea,” Gowdy added. “Strzok — you come before Congress, you come before the American public and prove to us that your manifest animus toward Donald Trump did not affect your decisions.”
Goodlatte pointed out that Republicans have been working on making that happen for “quite some time.”
“We’ve been requesting that he be produced as a witness for quite some time now, and if that agreement is not reached, we are very shortly going to issue a subpoena for him to appear,” Goodlatte said.
Gowdy seemed to walk back his comments from a couple of weeks ago when he defended the FBI’s use of informants in the Trump campaign.
While the congressman said he believed the FBI had good reason to investigate whether Russia was trying to interfere in the 2016 election, he noted that the agent leading the investigation should have been free of political “taint and bias” like the vast majority of FBI agents are.
“It just so happened the one picked to follow up and lead the Russia investigation has manifest animus and can’t think of a single person to vote for Donald Trump.” (In one of his texts to his paramour, fired FBI lawyer Lisa Page, Strzok had predicted that Clinton would win the election 100 million to zero.)
Gowdy seemed to be profoundly disgusted by the astounding “level of bias and animus” found in Horowitz’s report. “What a dark day it is for the FBI and for the DOJ,” he said. However, the fact that there was bias against Trump among investigators in the FBI’s Clinton email and Russia probes has been well known for months.
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