Trey Gowdy: No Dossier, No Surveillance of Carter Page

As I predicted on Thursday, the big pivot we were going to see when the memo written by the House Intelligence Committee was released was from “it is reckless and endangers national security” to “it’s nothing.”

Trey Gowdy was on Face the Nation the nation this morning and he answered that question succinctly:

MARGARET BRENNAN: Now, we should dig into this. Because you are, from my understanding, the only Republican investigator on the House Intelligence Committee who actually viewed the FISA applications. Everything that went into essentially putting together this memo. So, when you’re talking about this Steele memo, you are not saying that it was the sole piece of evidence used to justify these four authorizations of the surveillance warrant. Are you?

REP. GOWDY: No. It was not the exclusive information relied upon by– by the FISA court.

MARGARET BRENNAN: Would it have been authorized were it not for that dossier?

REP. GOWDY: No. It would not have been.

MARGARET BRENNAN: How can you say that? Because it was authorized four times by separate judges.

REP. GOWDY: Right. And the information was in there all four times.

MARGARET BRENNAN: Mm-hm.

REP. GOWDY: And the judge doesn’t do independent research. There are three Republicans that have seen every bit of information. Three of us: Bob Goodlatte, the chairman of the Judiciary; Johnny Ratcliffe, who’s a former terrorism prosecutor and U.S. attorney in Texas, and me. All three of us have total confidence in the FBI and DOJ to be able to do the jobs that they have been assigned. We have confidence in Bob Mueller, and we have serious consideration– serious concerns about this process. So, we have all three of those things in common, including being concerned about what–what happened in 2016.