On Sunday, Trey Gowdy, the former congressman and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, revealed during an interview on Fox News that the FBI withheld transcripts between George Papadopoulos and an FBI informant that have the “potential to be a game-changer.” He characterized the transcripts as exculpatory evidence.
Gowdy believes that while people on both sides weren’t persuaded by the Mueller report, the transcripts he has seen have “the potential to actually persuade people.”
“There is some information in these transcripts that I think has the potential to be a game-changer if it’s ever made public,” Gowdy told Maria Bartiromo on Sunday Morning Futures.
Of course, the big question is why hasn’t it been made public yet, and why wasn’t it provided to the Mueller investigation team?
Congressman John Ratcliffe (R-Texas) previously mentioned the existence of evidence withheld by the FBI when they sought approval to spy on the Trump campaign in 2016 over allegations of collusion with Russia. “Hypothetically, if the Department of Justice and the FBI have another piece of evidence that directly refutes that, that directly contradicts that, what you would expect is for the Department of Justice to present both sides of the coin to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to evaluate the weight and sufficiency of that evidence,” Ratcliffe said in October 2018. “Instead, what happened here was Department of Justice and FBI officials in the Obama administration in October of 2016 only presented to the court the evidence that made the government’s case to get a warrant to spy on a Trump campaign associate.”
All this evidence needs to be released now. Though considering the anti-Trump forces that are trying to undermine him from within the government, I don’t suspect this evidence will see the light of day until after Trump is out of office, and maybe not even then.
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Matt Margolis is the author of The Scandalous Presidency of Barack Obama and the bestselling The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama. His new book, Trumping Obama: How President Trump Saved Us From Barack Obama’s Legacy, will be published in July 2019. You can follow Matt on Twitter @MattMargolis
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