Republican Congressman Claims Trey Gowdy Will Retire in 2016

Republican Congressman Trey Gowdy will not seek election in the 2016 race for his House seat, according to fellow Republican Congressman John Fleming.

“At the end of his term… he plans to go back home, and he wants to finish his work on the Benghazi special committee,” Fleming said on C-SPAN Wednesday morning. “But he loves South Carolina and he loves his family, and he wants to go back and spend the rest of his life there.” Fleming claimed that Gowdy himself told him about the pending retirement.

Gowdy is best known for leading the congressional investigation into the State Department’s handling of the 2011 Benghazi attacks. Gowdy’s subpoena of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails helped spark the revelation that Clinton was operating a private email server. Indeed, in an interview Tuesday night, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy credited the committee for Clinton’s plummeting poll numbers.

If true, Gowdy’s retirement would be surprising given that many prominent GOP members of Congress were openly trying to draft him to replace outgoing Speaker of the House John Boehner, and at least one claimed he would definitely run for a position in House leadership.

UPDATE (10:27 AM ET): “No- He has not made any announcement on 2016,” a Gowdy spokesperson tells IJ Review. But at the same time, note that Gowdy’s office isn’t denying that he plans to retire, just that he made any announcement to that effect.

[h/t Washington Examiner]

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