Gaetz slams Trey Gowdy over 2018 F.B.I. remarks, claims 'failure of our Republican leadership'

Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz on Friday slammed what he called a "failure of our Republican leadership" in the Russia collusion investigation, also singling out former South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy for his claims that the F.B.I. behaved appropriately in its early investigations of the alleged plot. 

Gowdy had just appeared on Sean Hannity's program to discuss a series of questions he asked of Obama White House officials regarding the early Russia investigation efforts. Remarking on the response of then-U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power to a question about the publicization of Michael Flynn's involvement with Russian envoy Sergey Kislyak, Gowdy said Power's answer "ought to scare the hell out of you."

Appearing on the show shortly after Gowdy, Gaetz sarcastically referred to "Trey Gowdy's exquisite questions in 2017 to these corrupt officials."

"Why was it then that in late May of 2018 that Trey Gowdy went on Martha MacCallum's show and said that the F.B.I. did exactly what all of our fellow Americans would have wanted them to do and it had nothing to do with Donald Trump?" Gaetz said. 

"Both of those things have now been proven to be not true and it seems that Gowdy's brilliant lawyering back in 2017 that we're only able to see now proves those two statements untrue," he added. 

Gaetz last night posted to his Twitter account the 2018 remarks to which he was referring, in which Gowdy claimed that the F.B.I. in the course of the investigation "did exactly what [Americans] would want them to do when they got the information they got, and that it has nothing to do with Donald Trump." 

"Given all we've learned, this is hard to understand," Gaetz remarked on the video. 

On Hannity, Gaetz also criticized Republican leadership for allegedly hamstringing G.O.P. efforts to supervise the investigation. 

"Unfortunately when [Rep. Devin] Nunes and [Rep. Mark] Meadows and [Rep. Jim] Jordan and I wanted subpoena power it was Paul Ryan and Trey Gowdy that wouldn't give us that subpoena power. Democrats sent out hundreds of subpoenas," he said. 

"When he had control and could have run this to ground in 2017, we didn't send out one single subpoena, not one," he said, calling that decision "a failure of our Republican leadership."