Trey Gowdy Voices ‘100 Percent’ Preference for Private Congressional Hearings Amid GOP Complaints

Former congressman Trey Gowdy (R-SC) broke from the outrage of his fellow conservatives on Sunday by saying he stands by his position that closed-door Congressional hearings tend to be more “constructive” than public hearings.

Republican congressman have spent the last few days complaining about how the House of Representatives has been holding witness interviews in private as part of President Donald Trump’s impeachment inquiry. This culminated with the attempt by several Republican congressmen last week to barge into a secure proceeding in order to disrupt the process.

When CBS’ Margaret Brennan interviewed Gowdy on Face the Nation, she brought this up by asking Gowdy if he still agrees with what he said in 2018 when he called public hearings a “circus” and “a freak show.”

“Do you still believe that?” Brennan asked, to which, she received an answer of “One-hundred percent.” She continued by asking Gowdy for whether the depositions “should remain private.”

“You can’t pick and choose which aspects of due process you’re going to use,” Gowdy said. “It’s not just the privacy. I mean the reason we respect executive branch investigations isn’t because they’re behind closed doors, it’s because there’s no leaks.”

Gowdy continued to say that that executive branch investigations are “fact-centric and you wait until the ending to draw conclusions and because there are no leaks,” even as he said he understands Republican frustrations about the current probe.

“My bias has always been towards investigations that wait until the end before they share conclusions,” he said. “It is just not fair to do it on an hour by hour basis.”

When asked for his view of the GOP’s storming of the SCIF room, Gowdy called himself “a rule follower” and said “I threw out a Republican out of a hearing because he was not a member of the [House Oversight] Committee.”

Watch above, via CBS.

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