Fox Allows Gowdy To Ignore Sessions' Massive Conflict Of Interest In An Investigation Of Trump Campaign's Ties To Russia

Written by Media Matters Staff

Published

Fox News gave Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) a platform to dismiss the need of a special prosecutor to investigate ties between President Donald Trump's campaign and Russia. America's News HQ host Dana Perino allowed Gowdy to downplay the immense conflict of interest that would impede Attorney General Jeff Sessions from an objective investigation: he was a surrogate of Trump's campaign, the subject of the investigation. As reported by CNN, Rep. Darrel Issa (R-CA) said that “a special should investigate reported communications between the Trump campaign and Russians known to US intelligence, not Attorney General Jeff Sessions.” According to The Huffington Post, Democratic House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) has also called on Sessions to recuse himself, and the Department of Justice's ethics guidelines “prohibit employees from being involved in investigations in which they have a 'personal or political relationship with any person or organization substantially involved.'” Nevertheless, Gowdy asserted that “no one has offered any evidence” of a conflict, blatantly ignoring Sessions' official ties to the campaign. From the March 1 edition of Fox's America's News HQ:

DANA PERINO (HOST): Before I let you go, there was some question earlier this week whether one of the House members, Darrel Issa, was calling for a special prosecutor or independent review of the alleged Russian ties with the Trump campaign during this last year. You're on the intel committee. Do you think that those are now quelled and there's no need for that?

REP. TREY GOWDY (R-SC): Well, I hope so. Devin Nunes has been talking about Russia for a year now and Dana, there is no special prosecutor. I hate to break the hearts of my Republican and Democrat colleagues. There's no independent counsel. There's a special counsel, and Jeff Sessions would appoint that special counsel, but only if the department has a conflict and every United States attorney in the country has a conflict. No one has offered any evidence of any of that. So all the discussion about special prosecutor or special counsel, we don't even have the fact pattern yet. We don't even know that it's criminal in nature. So, that's just members of Congress talking about show hearings. I'm interested in a real investigation, and that probably needs to be done by the FBI.