Jason Chaffetz, a Fox News contributor and former Congressman from Utah, speaks at a Smith County Republican Club dinner at the Willow Brook Country Club in Tyler, Texas on April 26. (Erin Mansfield/Tyler Morning Telegraph) 

A Fox News contributor and former congressman from Utah told a crowd in Tyler about his experience as chairman of a committee charged with investigating wrongdoing in the federal government.

Jason Chaffetz drew a crowd of more than 100 people to a Smith County Republican Club dinner at Willow Brook Country Club in Tyler. 

From 2009 to 2017, Chaffetz represented residents of southern and southeastern Utah in the U.S. House of Representatives. During his last two years, he was chairman of the House Oversight Committee.

While chairman of the committee, Chaffetz led investigations involving Hillary Clinton’s performance while she was with the State Department. He told stories on Thursday night about suspicions he still has regarding the investigations he did.

Chaffetz resigned from his seat six months into his third term, at the end of June 2017, in order to start a job as a Fox News contributor. He said he now appears on television nearly every day and is able to bring his message to a larger audience.

“As chairman of that committee, he took strong stands against everyone across the political spectrum,” Texas Senator Brian Hughes, R-Mineola, said during his introduction of Chaffetz.

“We have seen how militant, how angry, how violent, the left has become in the last several years,” Hughes said. “The congressman felt the great brunt of them. They did not like him. They hated what he was doing because he was shining a light on corruption.”

Chaffetz spoke for nearly an hour, starting with his personal history of his first job, his parents’ divorce, and their battles with cancer. He joked that he was a Democrat as a young person but became a Republican as soon as he learned how to read and write.

Chaffetz criticized former President Barack Obama and his administration, criticized Clinton’s handling of the Benghazi attack in 2011, and raised questions about the 2013 scandal at involving how the Internal Revenue Service processed applications from some right-leaning political groups.

“There are some real decent people, and there are some slimebags out there, and they’re not all in one party,” Chaffetz said.

He questioned what he called “the deep state,” a term that refers to longtime bureaucrats who retain influence throughout administrations of different parties. He said he’s now writing a book on the topic.

Commissioner Cary Nix, of Whitehouse, asked Chaffetz what it would do to convict Hillary Clinton.

“First you need to put handcuffs on her,” Chaffetz joked.

“I don’t want it to be a witch hunt against one particular person,” Chaffetz continued. “What bothers me is the whole process on how we got there.”

He said a federal report would be coming out in the next two or three weeks that will have more information involving Clinton, and that information will have more information than what his committee was able to glean.

“We’re a bunch of wimps in Congress. We don’t actually stand up for ourselves. We don’t have a backbone, but they also don’t give us handcuffs in Congress.”

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