When you've lost Trey Gowdy

“I think prosecutors ought to speak through indictments,” Gowdy, [Fox News host and] former federal prosecutor said. “What Jim Comey did with his press conference was wrong. Robert Mueller has no business weighing in on anything on whether or not a crime was committed. Rob Hur, the same analysis. [...] Prosecutors don’t speak to press conferences or reports… Rob Hur’s job was to write a confidential report, not do opposition research for the Republican Party. Prosecutors are held to a different standard. We’re not political hacks and they should not act like that.”

  Mediaite

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Running smoothly

On Wednesday morning, the day after news leaked that Gowdy was set to serve as outside counsel to the president, Victoria Toensing, a veteran Washington lawyer who has been working with Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, expressed concern and disbelief that the onetime advocate for congressional oversight would be coming onboard.

“Trey Gowdy doesn’t know s***,” she said.

[...]

“He screwed up the Benghazi hearings, and he came out with the advice to Trump, ‘Well, if you’ve done nothing wrong, just talk to Bob Mueller.’”

[...]

Toensing went on to suggest that other lawyers working for the president shared her opinion.

“He’s not on the team. Trey Gowdy is not on the team. Who told you Trey Gowdy? Not to my knowledge, not to Rudy’s knowledge, not Joe’s knowledge,” said Toensing, who had not heard of the move at the time of her interview with Yahoo News on Wednesday morning. “I have to check that with Rudy because that would be a joke, because we all don’t think much of him,” she said of Gowdy, adding, “Are you kidding? ... Trey is a joke among us.”

However, by Wednesday evening, Sekulow officially announced Gowdy’s appointment.

  Yahoo

I think she's saying he won't make a good mob lawyer.

Toensing and her husband, Joe diGenova, work with Giuliani though they are not officially on Trump’s legal team. The pair, who are close with the president, are regulars on the conservative cable network Fox News. Last month, the channel reported they were “working off the books” with Giuliani to help get opposition research on former Vice President Joe Biden, who is currently mounting a White House bid.

We're gonna need a bigger boat.

In March of last year, it was announced that Toensing and DiGenova were set to formally join the team of lawyers working for the president on the Mueller probe. However, days later, Jay Sekulow, who works as Trump’s personal attorney along with Giuliani, said the pair could not come onboard due to conflicts. “Those conflicts do not prevent them from assisting the president in other legal matters,” Sekulow said.

[...]

Giuliani, a former New York City mayor who plays a dual role of legal adviser and media surrogate for the president, defended Gowdy when asked about Toensing’s criticisms. Specifically, he suggested Gowdy’s experience on Capitol Hill would be an asset to Trump.

“My opinion would be he would be an excellent addition, filling a gap that is getting to be more and more important because, frankly, Schiff is off the rails,” Giuliani said.

[...]

“The president is being represented in his personal capacity — because he’s still an American citizen with all the rights of an American citizen — by Jay and me,” Giuliani told Yahoo News. “Joe and Vicky are not representing the president. They are … representing some people that have information that could be very valuable to us.”

Giuliani did not specify who those people were, however.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Another Republican sells his soul to the Trump cabal

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:



Or Conehead.

Has he aged 20 years since he left Congress last year?

Also:

Fox News Channel has dropped former Rep. Trey Gowdy as a contributor after reports that he is joining President Donald Trump’s legal team as outside counsel for the impeachment inquiry.

A Fox News spokesperson said Gowdy “has been terminated and is no longer a contributor.”

[...]

When he was still in Congress and chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Gowdy did receive some harsh criticism from Trump’s team when he defended the FBI in its handling of the Russia investigation. Rudy Giuliani told CNN last year that Gowdy was “drinking the Kool-Aid.” Giuliani is one of Trump’s personal lawyers and a central figure in the impeachment inquiry.

But the sentiment toward Gowdy apparently has changed as he has been critical of the Democrats’ investigation.

Last week, Gowdy told Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum that Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), who is leading the impeachment inquiry, was “mishandling the investigation.”

  Deadline

Is Trump the most fickle person on the planet?

Strzok handing Gowdy his ass

Trey Gowdy won't be invited onto Fox News any more

Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC), told Fox News on Tuesday that after attending the President Trump-mandated classified Justice Department briefing last week, he’s “convinced” the FBI acted correctly in deploying an informant to meet with Trump campaign officials.

“I am even more convinced that the FBI did exactly what my fellow citizens would want them to do when they got the information they got and that it has nothing to do with Trump,” he said Tuesday evening.

[...]

“President Trump himself in the Comey memos said, ‘If anyone connected with my campaign was working with Russia, I want you to investigate it.’ Sounds to me like that was exactly what the FBI did.”

  TPM

He may have said it, but he didn't mean it.

Haven't heard anything out of Rudy for a couple of days. Maybe this will bring him out again.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

This didn't bring him out, but Trump's tweeting he wished he hadn't picked Jeff Sessions for AG did.  BTW: Rudy is the one who suggested Sessions for the job.  At least he claims he did.

Somebody really needs to take away his TV time

Yeah, well, you didn't.  You have zero impulse control.  If you'd spend a little time making decisions and let other, capable people guide you, you wouldn't be in the messes you're in.

Too bad you can't seem to fire your way out of this one.

You create these situations for yourself.  Stop whining like a spoiled brat, ferfuxsake.  You're the president of the United States of America.  Act like it.

And, Trey Gowdy, et al., stop excusing this asshole like this is simply normal behavior for a president.  It's not, and we're going down the gutter in a rush along with him because the GOP and the media paper over his insanity and talk about him like he's not an insane, narcissistic, big baby son-of-a-bitch who puts the entire world at risk.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Pruitt investigation

Yes, and once Gowdy is gone, if the Democrats don't take over the House in November, there'll never be another move like it.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Wow! is right

I know Gowdy is leaving, but still, he's a Republican.

And, furthermore...



...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

On releasing the Schiff memo

White House chief of staff John Kelly told reporters Tuesday that the administration would have a recommendation on the memo ready for the President on Thursday, but he said that Schiff's memo was "a lot less clean" than the Republican document.

"Where the first one was very clean relative to sources and methods, my initial cut is this one is a lot less clean," Kelly said. "We'll brief the President on it and he'll have a decision to make as to what he wants to do with it: Should he do the same thing he did on the first memo and essentially declassify it or should he declassify it with some redactions."

House Speaker Paul Ryan, who called for the Nunes memo release to spotlight potential "abuse" under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, sidestepped questions Tuesday on whether Trump should release the memo.

  CNN

Of course, The Most Notable Loser gave the go ahead to release the Nunes memo, to which the Schiff memo is a rebuttal, without redactions.

Does it strike you as being at all odd that the man who is the target of the investigation is the one deciding what memos shall and shall not be released? Honestly, I don't get that.

The House panel voted to release the Schiff memo Monday, giving Trump five days to object to or approve of its release. If he objects to the release or redacts portions of it, the House Intelligence Committee could vote to override his objections. If it were to take that unprecedented step, the full GOP-House would have to override the White House as well to give the public access to the Schiff memo.

[...]

[Rep. Mike Conaway, R-TX] said that Schiff has acknowledged things are included in his memo that would need to be redacted because they are classified, which was why he wanted the Justice Department and FBI to review it.

[...]

But [some] Republicans  [...]  say Schiff wrote the memo in a way that was intended to later accuse the White House of making political redactions.

"They set this up for that argument," said Rep. Chris Stewart, a Utah Republican who sits on the House Intelligence Committee. "As soon as I read it, I thought it's very clear what they're doing. They're setting this up to make the argument there's political redactions."

Whether that's true or not, we won't know unless we see the unredacted memo for ourselves, but there's a bigger problem here.

I don't see a way back from this constitutional override where each party does everything they can to stymie the other party. That's been building for several presidents. It was obvious and even publicly acknowledged during Obama's terms that Republican motto was "just say no" to everything the Democrats and the president proposed. Now, it seems the tables are turned, but the Democrats aren't as brassy as to say so publicly, and they're not quite as good at it as the Republicans.

The two party system is well and truly broken. Maybe we can find our way out by doing away with that system, but I don't believe it can simply be repaired. Of course, it's no secret that I've never liked that system in the first place.  Where could it have possibly led to but here?  But, it used to work toward some good for the country from time to time. That's gone.  It's not coming back.

 ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:  The Conaway suggestion must be the GOP's talking point on the Schiff memo.

During a Fox News interview that aired Tuesday night, [Rep Trey] Gowdy floated his own theory about why the Democrats’ memo requires redactions: They’re trying to trap President Trump. “I think the Democrats are politically smart enough to put things in the memo that require either the [FBI] or the Department of Justice to say it needs to be redacted. Therefore, it creates this belief that there’s something being hidden from the American people,” Gowdy said.

[...]

Later in the interview, Gowdy reiterated that he’s not ready to say there was an anti-Trump conspiracy within the DOJ because, “I never allege a conspiracy when simple incompetence will suffice as an explanation.”

  NY Magazine

Right, Mr. Benghazi.

Gowdy doesn't want to play any more

He's retiring, so he has nothing to gain.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

What happened in the HPSCI meeting when voting to release "the memo"

Here's the transcript of the January 29 HPSCI meeting if you want to read it yourself.  (I haven't done so yet.)

And here are some excerpts from a Lawfare Blog summary of the transcript.

Adam Schiff, the lead Democrat on the Committee, made three motions: 1) that a rebuttal memo (the "minority memo") put together by the Dems should be made available to all members of the House, just as the Nunes majority memo was; 2) that the DOJ and FBI should be allowed to review both memos and then recommend to the Committee whether or not the Nunes memo should be released publicly; and 3) that if the Nunes memo gets released, the Dems rebuttal should also be released. All reasonable requests, all voted down by the Republicans.

Schiff emphasizes that only he and Rep. Trey Gowdy have seen the underlying intelligence on which the Nunes memo is based (only members of the Gang of Eight have access to the intelligence, but Gowdy viewed the intelligence for the majority).

I have to wonder if any of this is why Gowdy announced today that he's not going to seek re-election in November. I think it probably does. Either to protect himself, or to avoid what he believes will eventually be an inevitable impeachment. Or maybe he even has more reason.

Democratic Rep. Mike Quigley complains that the [Nunes] memo has distracted the committee from its work on the Russia investigation. [Rep. Mike Conaway (a Republican who has been leading the Russia investigation alongside Schiff in the wake of Nunes’s unofficial recusal)] points out that Steve Bannon is scheduled to come in for a second hearing on Wednesday (this hearing has since been canceled). [...] Schiff notes that the committee has yet to schedule a follow-up hearing with Corey Lewandowski. Nunes chimes in: “This is not a place to discuss the Russia investigation.”

Surely he doesn't mean this Committee, since that's exactly what it's supposed to be doing. He must mean this particular meeting, which is to call a vote on whether to release the Nunes memo.

Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell argues that releasing the memo to the public will breach an agreement between the committee and the Justice Department that “there would be limited access to the mostly highly sensitive of materials as relates to Russia.” [...] Swalwell makes the point that Nunes’s memo risks destroying the relationship between the committee and the intelligence community, making it impossible for the committee to function as an oversight body.

This is the very point ex-intelligence officer Paul Pillar made in his article today on the subject.

All committee members vote in favor [of permitting the entire House access to the minority memo] except Republican Rep. Mike Turner, who was reportedly unable to make it back to Washington in time for the vote.

Nunes then reads into the record a letter from Republican Rep. Peter King calling for the Nunes memo’s public release under House Rule X, clause 11(g). Rep. King speaks in favor of the memo’s publication, noting that FBI Director Christopher Wray discussed the memo with Nunes and Gowdy the day before.

In response to King’s comment regarding Wray, Swalwell asks “what did the FBI say as to dissemination to the public?” He does not receive a response.

This is where Rep. Crawford comes in on TV saying Wray said there were no factual errors in the memo, a bald faced lie, as we found out today when the FBI released a statement saying the exact opposite. I have to wonder again if Gowdy decided to get out in part because he knew the GOP body was going to be lying, and he didn't want to get caught in it. Trey Gowdy, who always gave me the creeps, may turn out to be the only smart Republican in the bunch. These guys are on some seriously shaky ground. Orange jumpsuits all 'round, please.

Democratic Rep. Jim Himes asks Nunes whether his memo will be released in full or whether “references to highly classified information” will be redacted. Nunes does not directly answer, but suggests that the memo will be released without redactions, saying only: “We will make the content available.”

Nunes is obviously trying to be obtuse and uncooperative with the Democrats on the Committee.

[Schiff then makes his second motion] to postpone the vote until the FBI and Justice Department can review the Nunes memo in full and brief the committee. Nunes announces that “the Department of Justice and the FBI have been under investigation by this committee for many, many months for FISA abuse and other matters … I would urge my colleagues to vote no, we are not going to be briefed by people that are under investigation by this committee.”

The DOJ and FBI have been under investigation for many, many months? That must have come as a real shock.  We were just told this news after this meeting on Monday. All this time, we were under the impression that the House Intel Committee was investigating possible Russian collusion with the Trump campaign.  We knew they were going to clear Trump by the way they were conducting the investigation, but we didn't know they were using their time to investigate the FBI instead!

None of the Democrats appear to have been aware of this investigation.

That has to be a very serious violation of the Committee's own rules and procedures. In fact...

Quigley argues that Nunes has violated rule 9(a) of the committee’s rules, which requires the committee to conduct investigations “only if approved by the chair in consultation with the ranking minority member”—meaning Schiff. But Schiff says that this is the first he’s been formally notified of it.

This investigation should be officially disbanded, and Nunes should be sanctioned and removed from his position on the Committee.

Quigley asks Nunes whether he has coordinated the memo with the White House. “As far as I know, no,” says Nunes.

As far as he knows?? Who knows if he doesn't?

Quigley then asks whether any of the majority’s staff have coordinated with the White House. Nunes refuses to answer and cuts him off.

That'll be a "yes" then.

I'm going to assume that at the very least, Mueller will eventually haul Nunes in to the obstruction investigation.*

[Dem Rep. Jim] Himes voices his concern that the committee will apparently be releasing the memo unredacted, noting that “an immense amount of classified information will be available to the public.”

[...]

Swalwell suggests that, if Nunes insists that the FBI and Justice Department are under investigation, the committee could pass the memo to an inspector general of another agency for review before its release. He suggests the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Nunes does not respond.

Jesus Christ. Nunes is in very, very deep.

Schiff requests a delay of the memo’s release until after a briefing by the FBI and Justice Department. The Republicans vote it down along party lines. All Democrats vote in favor.

I guess that includes Gowdy. Coward. He's not out of the woods in this, either, if this goes to the obstruction case, no matter whether he retires from office or not. Of course, he could always be "flipped".

Schiff now requests that the minority’s memo be released publicly alongside Nunes’s memo. Conaway says that he will oppose the motion. He would prefer for the minority memo to go through the same process as the Nunes memo: pause for a “time of reflection” after releasing the memo to the House before releasing it to the public.

How handy. The rebuttal has to lag behind. And how long might it take for "reflection" in this amazingly corrupt GOP-led committee?

Schiff argues the majority is behaving hypocritically: the committee’s Republicans criticized Hillary Clinton for what FBI Director James Comey called her “extremely careless” handling of classified information, but they are now planning to vote to release classified information in what the Justice Department called an “extraordinarily reckless” fashion.

Hypocrisy is the least of their crimes.

All present Republicans vote against [the third motion requesting release of the minority memo along with the majority one]. All Democrats vote for it, with the exception of Rep. Jackie Speier, who votes present.

What the hell is Jackie's problem?

Finally, the committee votes on Nunes’s motion to release his memo to the public.

All Republicans present vote in favor—except for Rep. Will Hurd, who has stepped out of the room and will add his “aye” vote retroactively at the end of the meeting. All Democrats vote against making the memo public.

Schiff calls for another vote on his motion to release the minority memo alongside the Nunes memo, now that the committee has voted for the Nunes memo’s release. The vote is the same.

Schiff requests that the transcript of these proceedings be released to the public as soon as possible.

But that's not even the worst...

When Benjamin Wittes and I reached out to the offices of every committee Republican (except Nunes) and asked whether the representatives had faith in the factual conclusions of the memo, only three members of the committee answered in the affirmative (six did not respond to our repeated requests to contact them, and three responded but conspicuously did not answer our question as to the memo’s integrity).

WTF is wrong with these people? It seems the whole of the Republican elite has gone to the dark side. Why would you implicate yourself in such shady, and even illegal, activity? Something is terribly wrong in this government.

[O]f the majority, only Nunes, Conaway and King speak up over the course of the meeting—and Conaway’s points are mostly procedural, not a substantive defense of the memo. Also notable is that Rep. Chris Stewart told us last week that he would support the Nunes memo’s release if sensitive information were redacted, and yet voted for the unredacted memo’s publication. During the meeting, Conaway similarly voiced concerns over publication of classified information—albeit regarding the minority memo—but voted in favor of the unredacted Nunes memo’s release as well.

Un-freaking-believable. This Committee has gone light years beyond being worthless and has stepped over into some very dark territory.

UPDATE:

My god, it gets even worse!

*UPDATE:

UPDATE:  Mike Quigley has posted his interview with Anderson Cooper.

UPDATE 2/1:

Just. Wow.

Another episode of rats leaving a sinking ship

Earlier this month, Trey Gowdy announced he was stepping down from the Ethics Committee. Now he's saying he won't seek re-election to the House of Representatives.

In a statement posted to his social media accounts, Gowdy said “there is a time to come and a time to go” – adding “this is the right time, for me, to leave politics.”

“I will not be filing for re-election to Congress nor seeking any other political or elected office,” Gowdy said in his statement. “Instead I will be returning to the justice system. Whatever skills I may have are better utilized in a courtroom than in Congress, and I enjoy our justice system more than our political system.
  Fitsnews

Gowdy has served from South Carolina since 2011, chairing the infamous Benghazi committee.

Very interesting.

The rats are abandoning ship.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

Ramping up the base propaganda

Monday on Fox News, representatives Trey Gowdy and John Ratcliffe suggested that based on Strzok and Page’s texts, they may have been in an anti-Trump “secret society” within the Justice Department.

“The day after the election, what they really didn’t want to have happen, there is a text exchange between these two FBI agents, these supposed to be fact-centric FBI agents saying, ‘Perhaps this is the first meeting of the secret society,’” Gowdy said.

  NY Magazine

Funny they don't seem to be concerned about the actually proven "secret society" of New York office FBI staff who helped Rudy Giuliani trick Comey into reopening and then closing again the investigation into Clinton's emails just days before the 2016 election.

That text has not been released, and the representatives offered no context that may explain whether it was a joke or actual proof of an anti-Trump conspiracy.

And I think you can safely bet the life of your firstborn that, if they had ANYthing that constituted actual proof of an anti-Trump conspiracy in the FBI, they would have it on the front page of every newspaper and blasted over every major TV network in the country.

Tuesday on Fox News, Senator [Ron] Johnson claimed an “informant” has talked about “secret meetings off-site” of the Justice Department — but of course he couldn’t offer any further details.

Of course.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:



And speaking of Lizard People:

Not to worry:  we all know the Lizard People are the British royals.

UPDATE:

Here's that "secret society" text.  Let's see the response.  It looks like a joke to me.

UPDATE:

The "secret society" explanation.

Thread

What's the real story behind Trey Gowdy's Ethics resignation?

South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy resigned his membership on the House Committee on Ethics to concentrate on his other legislative duties.

  Daily Caller

Why does this make me immediately think he has an ethics problem?

His new position as Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee prompted the resignation, according to a letter Gowdy sent to House Majority Leader Rep. Paul Ryan.

[...]

“When I became Chairperson of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform I knew I would not be able to keep all other committee assignments to include Judiciary, Intelligence and Ethics. Four committee assignments, including a Chairmanship, is a challenging workload,” he added.

So why accept another assignment? Or why wait until now to resign from one?

His tenure in Congress has been a rocky one. Gowdy, who was elected during the Tea Party wave of 2010, used $150,000 in taxpayer dollars to settle with a former aide who alleged he was fired for not focusing his investigative work on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Gowdy, a Tea Party Republican, spent two years and $7 million investigating Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as the chairman of the United States House Select Committee on Benghazi. In June of last year, the hyper-partisan endeavor found “no new evidence of culpability or wrongdoing by Hillary Clinton in the 2012 attacks in Libya that left four Americans dead."

  NCRM

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Helpful distraction and cover for Dolt 45

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte and House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy announced Tuesday they would open a joint investigation into decisions made by the Department of Justice during the 2016 campaign.

  Politico

Tie up resources. Hound Comey. Muddy Mueller investigation.  Etc.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Investigators Don't Leak

There is an interesting article by another intelligence officer online. There are many important points about the difference between intelligence and evidence and why intelligence officials and investigators have to keep a lid on what they're doing. Here's just one of them:

While the intelligence and the law enforcement communities work together in CI cases, it is critical not to conflate secretly acquired intelligence with evidence. By its very nature, intelligence is fragmentary. An overheard conversation of a Russian intelligence officer speaking about an American official is intelligence worth collecting. Of course, it would be unfair to the official in question if we took the information as gospel. It may or may not be accurate. Evidence, on the other hand, is the government’s final assessment of a fact. It is information that has been vetted and prepared to take to a jury. So, when Trey Gowdy pressed the Director of CIA to answer under oath a question like, “Do you have evidence of Trump-Russia collusion or not?”, he knows full well that an intelligence professional can never claim to have collected “evidence.”

  The Cipher Brief

On the other hand, I think Trey Gowdy is pretty well convinced of the Trump Cabal's guilt already.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

House Intel's Gowdy Turning Away from Trump

This strikes me as a seminal point, perhaps a turning point: Trey Gowdy on Fox News questioning the Trump administration's credibility.

Appearing on Fox News Tuesday evening, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) said he was “troubled on three levels” after reading the chain of emails that Trump Jr. released, revealing what led to the meeting between the President’s son, his son-in-law Jared Kushner, then-campaign manager Paul Manafort and a Kremlin-linked lawyer. When asked what disturbed him most, Gowdy said words like “‘Russian government’s efforts to help the Trump campaign,’ ‘official documents.’”

“Those are the kind of words that for months and months, Republicans have been saying, ‘There is no evidence of collusion between Trump, the Trump campaign, or even hangers-on,’” he said. “And here we have this meeting that may amount to nothing, but here we are on a Tuesday on a week when we ought to be discussing infrastructure and tax reform, and we are still talking about Russia, and frankly (it) came up with some good reason because this email, we should have known about it before yesterday.”

[...]

Gowdy said he was “troubled” from a legal level, a political level and a “medical” level, saying he’s worried about the health of people who worked for President Donald Trump’s campaign.

  TPM

What does he mean by that health comment?

“The third, which is more of a medical issue, is the amnesia of people that are in the Trump orbit. Someone close to the President needs to get everyone connected with that campaign in a room and say, ‘From the time you saw ‘Dr. Zhivago’ until the moment you drank vodka with a guy named Boris, you list every single one of those, and we are going to turn them over to the special counsel,’” he said, referencing the 1965 movie. “Because, this drip, drip, drip, it is undermining the credibility of this administration.”

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Leaky, Leaky

President Donald Trump is still looking for a new FBI director more than three weeks after he fired James Comey, and sources familiar with the recruiting process say it has been chaotic and that job interviews led by Trump have been brief.

[...]

While the department has compiled a long list of candidates for the White House, there has been no “clear framework or logic for who was interviewed and why,” said one of the sources.

[...]

Another of the three sources described the process as chaotic and said that in one interview, Trump spoke mostly about himself and seemed distracted.

[...]

On May 18, Trump told reporters he was "very close" to sending a nomination for a new director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation to the Senate. At the time, former Senator Joe Lieberman was a front-runner for the post. He withdrew his name from consideration on May 25.

[...]

Republican Representative Trey Gowdy was under consideration but he said on May 15 he was not interested.

The next day, Republican Senator John Cornyn, also a contender, said he would stay in the Senate.

  Reuters

....but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Brennan Testimony Before House Intel Committee

Rep. Trey Gowdy asked [Former CIA Director John Brennan, in testimony Tuesday before the House Intelligence Committee ...],  whether he had seen evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Brennan replied: "I don't do evidence."

Pressed further, however, Brennan said that "the information and intelligence revealed contacts and interactions between Russian officials and US persons involved in the Trump campaign that I was concerned about because of known Russian efforts to suborn such individuals. It raised questions in my mind about whether the Russians were able to gain the cooperation of such individuals."

[...]

Brennan said he doesn't know if collusion ever occurred, but he said that he saw "information that was worthy of investigation by the [FBI] to determine whether such collusion took place."

"People on a treasonous path ....don't always realize they're on that path until it's too late," Brennan said. He added that the House Intelligence Committee "now has access to the type of information I'm alluding to here."

Brennan later confirmed to Democratic Rep. Mike Quigley that it wasn't just the fact that Trump campaign officials communicated with Russians that concerned him — it was which Russians the Trump associates spoke to.

[...]

Democratic Rep. Jackie Speier asked Brennan about Russian oligarchs investing in the United States, and whether he was aware of efforts by the Russians to cultivate Trump while he was a real estate developer.

Brennan replied that he could not comment. But he noted later that the Russians have long engaged in money laundering "in a number of countries" and that the intelligence community has seen more collaboration recently between Russian intelligence services and organized criminals.

  Business Insider

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Switch Bait

Following pressure from Democrats and Republicans, House Intelligence Committee Chair David Nunes will step aside from the investigation into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election.

[...]

The probe will now be conducted by congressional members Michael Conaway (R, Texas), Trey Gowdy (R, South Carolina), and Tom Rooney (R, Florida). Rep. Gowdy is chairman of a House Select Committee which carried out the investigation into the 2012 Benghazi attack.

  RT

So, no ethics problem there, eh? He's also the guy at the Comey hearing whose only concerns were whether the FBI would be investigating who leaked the information about Flynn's Russia connections and insisting the Obama administration wiretapped Trump Tower.

The revelation that Nunes had viewed intelligence materials on White House grounds the day before bolstering the administration’s case – without briefing Democrats on the committee first – fueled damaging speculation that he was acting on instructions of the president.

[...]

[House Speaker Paul] Ryan called the ethics probe of Nunes a “distraction” to the committee’s investigation of Russian interference, adding that Nunes stepped away because he wants to clear himself without holding up the Intelligence Committee.

Uh-huh.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.