WASHINGTON — House Oversight Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy, R-South Carolina, 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 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. As I look back on my career, it is the jobs that both seek and reward fairness that are most rewarding,” he said.
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 election and prompted an FBI review of her actions that reverberated until the final days of the campaign.
Gowdy’s South Carolina district is heavily Republican.
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