House Oversight Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) announced Wednesday that he will retire at the end of the current term and leave politics to return to work in the justice system.
A former prosecutor, Gowdy rose to prominence as chairman of a special House panel investigating the deadly 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s role in the State Department’s response.
“I will not be filing for reelection to Congress nor seeking any other political or elected office; instead I will be returning to the justice system,” Gowdy, 53, said in a statement.
“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,” he said. “As I look back on my career, it is the jobs that both seek and reward fairness that are most rewarding.”
The special panel’s discovery of Clinton’s use of a private email server for government business became a significant issue in the 2016 presidential campaign, in which she was the Democratic nominee, and prompted an FBI review of her actions that reverberated until the final days of the race.
Gowdy’s northern South Carolina district is heavily Republican and includes the city of Greenville.
More than 40 members of the House GOP have decided to step down this cycle. Some received jobs in the Trump administration; others are leaving to seek higher office or because they were accused of sexual misconduct or harassment. Still others faced tough reelection campaigns or blamed the divisive political climate.
It was unclear what role Gowdy might seek in the justice system. One of the judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit took “senior status” on Tuesday, creating a vacancy on the bench.
National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Steve Stivers praised Gowdy as a model public servant.
“Trey Gowdy exemplifies the persona of a public servant. His tenure in the justice system allowed him to bring a deep breadth of knowledge to Congress on the importance of fully prosecuting those who commit violent crimes, while keeping victims’ rights intact. His commitment to his constituents and victims across the country is unmatched,” Stivers said in a statement.
Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spokesman Patrick Burgwinkle criticized Gowdy, saying his tenure “made a mockery of Congressional oversight.”
“His eagerness to use the deaths of brave Americans overseas in service of his partisan, political goals is a dark and shameful chapter in the history of the House of Representatives,” Burgwinkle said in a statement.
Gowdy, who won his seat in 2010 by ousting moderate Republican Bob Inglis, had talked for years about retiring. In 2016, he waited until weeks before the election filing deadline to declare his candidacy for reelection, after months of speculation that he would leave once the House Select Committee on Benghazi finished its work.
Gowdy’s contribution to that panel made him a major player in the 2016 election. His researchers discovered that Clinton had used a private server for email while in the State Department, and in 2015, weeks before the first votes were cast in the Democratic presidential primaries, Gowdy brought Clinton before the committee for testimony that dragged late into the night.
Gowdy’s background as a prosecutor was legendary among his colleagues, who praised him for asking precise, cutting questions in settings where members of Congress were often given to rambling.
“He can ask a question,” Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) said when Gowdy was picked to run the committee, adding: “Now, the bar is low in Congress, I’ll be first to admit.”
In 2017, after then-Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) surprised Republican House members by retiring from Congress, Gowdy’s colleagues elevated him to lead that panel. In that role, Gowdy emerged as a defender of President Trump in the ongoing investigations of possible Russian involvement in the 2016 presidential campaign, most recently saying that text messages between FBI agents who were looking into Trump’s campaign suggested that their investigation was biased.
“It’s clear that they did not want [Clinton] charged; they wanted her to be the president of the United States. They really, really didn’t want Donald Trump to be the president of the United States, and they concede throughout these texts that they did things in this investigation differently from any other investigation that they were part of,” Gowdy said on Fox News Channel last week.
Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and a former South Carolina governor, praised her fellow Republican in a tweet Wednesday.
“I always said the reason @TGowdySC was amazing at his job was bc he disliked politics so much. Trey, thank you for your impatience, sacrifice, and fight to make our country a more just place,” Haley wrote.
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