Missing Trey Gowdy Investigators Found Dead, Gowdy in Protective Custody-Fiction!
Summary of eRumor:
Investigators working for U.S. Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) on a criminal investigation of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton went missing and were later found dead, and Gowdy himself has been taken into protective custody.
The Truth:
An admitted fake news website is behind a series of false reports that investigators working for Trey Gowdy went missing and were later found dead.
The website Last Line of Defense reported on April 20, 2017, that two investigators working for Trey Gowdy went missing while investigating Hillary Clinton for criminal wrongdoing. Then, in a follow-up report on April 25 that appeared under the headline, “Trey Gowdy Breaks His Silence After Two of His Investigators are Found Tortured and Killed,” the site reported that the missing investigators had been tortured and murdered while en route to serve search warrant to the Clinton Presidential Library:
Mr. Gowdy, who has had little to nothing to say on the matter for security reasons, released a statement from his office where he is currently holed up under the protection of US Marshals:
The incident in Arkansas is just the latest in a vast conspiracy to cover up crimes by one of the most corrupt families in human history. No, we have no evidence. There’s never any evidence. What we do have, however, is a mole. Someone inside my own committee cost those men their lives by leaking their travel plans. I intend to find out who that mole is and have them waterboarded as an enemy of the state until they give up their boss.
Gowdy is clearly at the end of his rope. To insist on enhanced interrogation means he believes the perpetrator is an enemy combatant. That’s going to put a lot of pressure on the family in question to cover their tracks. Hopefully nobody else needs to go missing.
The story was quickly shared thousands of times on social media, leading many to believe that federal investigators working for Trey Gowdy had actually gone missing while investigating Hillary Clinton. However, Last Line of Defense isn’t a trustworthy source of news. The site’s own disclaimer states that it uses information and sources that aren’t reliable, and that it reports facts that don’t necessarily exist:
DISCLAIMER: The Resistance may include information from sources that may or may not be reliable and facts that don’t necessarily exist. All articles should be considered satirical and any and all quotes attributed to actual people complete and total baloney. Pictures that represent actual people should be considered altered and not in any way real.
In reality, Trey Gowdy chaired the House Select Committee on Benghazi, which was tasked with investigating 2012 attacks carried out on two U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya, that left four American officials dead. The investigation largely focused on the role of Hillary Clinton, who was secretary of state during the attacks. The committee concluded its investigation during the summer of 2016 and released a final report in December 2016.
Trey Gowdy was not conducting a criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton when reports that two of Gowdy’s investigators were found tortured and killed went viral in April 2017. Gowdy’s investigation had concluded months earlier, and found no criminal wrongdoing on Clinton’s behalf. Because of that, and the fact that Last Line of Defense is not a trustworthy site, we’re calling this rumor “fiction.”