Grassley using Judiciary Committee to avenge Donald Trump
A revealing speech at the Iowa State Fairgrounds
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When President Donald Trump gave Senator Chuck Grassley his “complete and total endorsement” during an October 2021 rally at the Iowa State Fairgrounds, he said one undeniably truthful thing about Iowa’s senior senator: “When I’ve needed him for help he was always there. […] He was with us all the way, every time I needed something.”
At the latest Trump rally in Des Moines, Grassley showed once again that the president’s assessment was on the money.
PUTTING THE JUDICIARY COMMITTEE AT TRUMP’S SERVICE
The July 3 event at the fairgrounds was billed as the kickoff of a nonpartisan “America 250” celebration. It was more like a campaign rally, from the MAGA merch in the crowd to an all-Republican speaker lineup to Trump’s rambling, hour-long speech filled with lies and vitriol.
Grassley’s remarks drew little notice, which was understandable, given the U.S. House vote for the budget reconciliation bill earlier in the day, and the many newsworthy aspects of Trump’s speech. To name a few: the president advocated letting undocumented immigrants stay in the country if farmers are willing to vouch for them, expressed his “hate” for Democrats, bashed the “fake news” and other favorite targets, and dropped an antisemitic slur while bragging about how his “big, beautiful bill” would help farmers avoid estate taxes.
Still, Grassley’s comments are worth a closer look, because they illustrate how he is using the Senate Judiciary Committee to serve Trump’s political goals.
WOI-TV in Des Moines live-streamed the entire America 250 event. Grassley begins speaking around the 58:15 mark of this video, more than an hour before Trump took the stage. I’ve cued it up to the last portion, beginning around 1:04:35.
Grassley left the audience with “one last point, that I don’t think gets the attention it should.” My transcript:
But I’m going to make sure as chairman of this committee, by listening to whistleblowers, getting documents that have been kept from the Congress of the United States, I’m going to make sure that everybody is exposed—and the documents prove it—for the eight years, the eight years that the opposition was trying to put President Trump in prison. [applause, cheers from crowd]
What we’re doing, whether we had Republican or Democrat administrations over my years in the United States Congress, this president and his appointees to the Department of Justice and the FBI has given us the first real cooperation that we should have had under both Republican and Democratic presidents before. But it was just obfuscate, and cover up, and not let the truth out, because it’s going to be embarrassing.
So we’re getting some whistleblowers their jobs back. We are releasing documents, because I want everybody who had anything to do, since President Trump went down that golden elevator [sic] in 2015, have been trying to get him out of the presidency, or when he was out of the presidency, getting into prison.
We don’t have to put up with that in America. President Trump hasn’t put [up with] it in America. And I want to thank President Trump and his administration for helping me make this stuff more transparent and never see that it happens again. Thank you.
Let’s peel back the layers of absurdity.
“I’M GOING TO MAKE SURE THAT EVERYBODY IS EXPOSED”
In his role as Judiciary Committee chair, Grassley promised, “I’m going to make sure that everybody is exposed” for “the eight years that the opposition was trying to put President Trump in prison.”
He does not allow for the possibility that Trump faced investigations and potential incarceration because he committed crimes.
Prosecutors compiled overwhelming evidence that Trump led a wide-ranging conspiracy to stay in power after losing the 2020 election. Trump was recorded demanding over the phone that Georgia officials find him enough votes to change the result in that state. Photographic evidence showed how he mishandled classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort after leaving office. Many people have gone to prison for less.
Disregarding such facts, Grassley is now determined to expose “everybody who had anything to do” with opposing Trump since he launched his first presidential campaign.
Back in 2016, the senator sang a different tune. At that time, he questioned whether Justice Department officials who investigated presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s email server had conflicts of interest. “It is vital that the American people have confidence in the ability of the Department to be impartial with regard to criminal inquiries related to senior officials and candidates for high office,” Grassley wrote to the department’s inspector general.
“WE ARE RELEASING DOCUMENTS”
On July 1, the Senate Judiciary Committee released a batch of documents and a redacted FBI report that had been issued and recalled in September 2020. A news release hyped the documents as “bombshell records” showing “the FBI suppressed intelligence of alleged Chinese interference in the 2020 election to insulate then-FBI Director Christopher Wray from criticism.”
The Judiciary Committee claimed the FBI “never fully investigated” credible information “alleging the Chinese government was producing ‘tens of thousands’ of fraudulent drivers’ licenses to manufacture mail-in votes for then-presidential candidate Joe Biden in the 2020 election.” Grassley asserted in the statement, “These records smack of political decision-making and prove the Wray-led FBI to be a deeply broken institution.”
As with the false bribery allegations that Grassley flogged for months to discredit Biden, the senator did not vouch for the accuracy of the recalled report. That is to say, he didn’t claim China actually shipped fake IDs to the U.S. in order to rig the 2020 election. Rather, he slammed the FBI for allegedly not doing its job: “One way or the other, intelligence must be fully investigated to determine whether it’s true, or if it’s just smoke and mirrors,” Grassley said.
A casual reader would assume the documents point to Chinese election interference. FBI Director Kash Patel implied as much when he announced last month that the documents “detail alarming allegations related to the 2020 U.S. election, including allegations of interference by the CCP.”
But the records show FBI personnel raised several red flags about the information. The same confidential human source had previously relayed to the FBI that “the Chinese Government had underground bases in Republican states” to disperse COVID-19. In addition, the source claimed China was able to create fake IDs after collecting Americans’ addresses through TikTok accounts. But since people don’t have to submit an address when creating a TikTok account, “It was unspecified how China would attain US address data from the application.”
Will Sommer of The Bulwark dug into the trove of Judiciary Committee documents and posited “a simpler explanation” for why the FBI didn’t investigate the fake driver’s license claims more aggressively: “It’s because the source sounds like a straight-up kook who appears to have received his information from a Facebook hoax.”
“WE DON’T HAVE TO PUT UP WITH THAT IN AMERICA”
To hear Grassley tell the story, “the opposition” spent the last decade trying to keep Trump out of the White House or put him in prison.
He has never acknowledged how Trump repeatedly sought to weaponize the criminal justice system. At the Just Security website, Adam Klasfeld and Ryan Goodman compiled a detailed accounting and timeline of a dozen times Trump “used the Department of Justice and other levers of government power — including by directly, publicly or privately, pressuring officials — to target his chosen political adversaries” during his first term.
Number 10 on their list was the July 2019 phone call in which Trump tried to persuade Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to open a criminal investigation of Joe Biden. A whistleblower promptly reported that abuse of power, setting the wheels in motion for Trump’s first impeachment.
Grassley voted to acquit Trump, of course. Despite his purported commitment to transparency, he didn’t mind that the administration blocked some witnesses from speaking to Congress and withheld many relevant documents during the impeachment inquiry. The senator who had voted to convict President Bill Clinton of obstructing justice in 1999 found the obstruction charge against Trump to be “unprecedented and patently frivolous.”
When the Trump administration fired several witnesses who did testify in the first impeachment inquiry, Grassley (a self-styled champion for whistleblowers) made excuses for the obvious retaliation.
“NEVER SEE THAT IT HAPPENS AGAIN”
Grassley ended his July 3 speech by thanking “President Trump and his administration for helping me make this stuff more transparent and never see that it happens again.”
News flash: it’s already happening.
Trump picked Patel, a conspiracy theorist who had famously published an “enemies list,” to lead the FBI. Instead of naming a career agent as deputy director (like every president before him had done), Trump picked Dan Bongino, a podcaster who has advocated prosecuting various prominent Democrats, to be the second-ranking FBI official.
Days after returning to the Oval Office, the president fired several senior FBI officials who worked in the intelligence, counterterrorism, or security areas, and his acting attorney general fired career Justice Department lawyers who had investigated Trump.
In February, acting U.S. Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove (who had previously been one of Trump’s criminal defense attorneys) ordered the U.S. Attorney’s office in Manhattan to drop corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, prompting “at least seven prosecutors” in New York and Washington to resign.
In March, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said when introducing the president to speak to Justice Department staff and some state attorneys general, “We all work for the greatest president in the history of our country. We are so proud to work at the directive of Donald Trump.”
In April, Trump signed memos ordering the Justice Department to investigate Miles Taylor, who was deputy chief of staff for Trump’s Homeland Security secretary during his first term, and Christopher Krebs, the election security director who angered the president by saying in November 2020 that the presidential election had been the “most secure in American history.”
Later in April, Trump “ordered the Justice Department to investigate the Democratic Party’s top fundraising platform,” ActBlue.
In May, the Justice Department launched a criminal investigation into New York Attorney General Letitia James, who had led a civil fraud case against then presidential candidate Trump.
In early June, Trump directed Bondi to investigate “the circumstances surrounding Biden’s supposed execution of numerous executive actions during his final years in office.”
The same week, a career federal prosecutor in Tennessee resigned over concerns that the Justice Department’s criminal case against Kilmar Abrego Garcia (the man mistakenly deported to a prison in El Salvador) was politically motivated.
In late June, the Justice Department “fired at least three prosecutors involved in U.S. Capitol riot criminal cases.”
On July 3—just a few hours before Grassley was on stage at the fairgrounds—the Lawfare blog published an essay by Michael Feinberg about his resignation as the Assistant Special Agent in Charge for national security and intelligence programs in the FBI’s Norfolk Field Office. Several weeks earlier, his boss had told him he wouldn’t be getting an expected promotion, and would likely be demoted, because Bongino learned he was friends with Pete Strzok.
How did Bongino find out about this private friendship? I honestly don’t know. What business was it of his? None at all. Was I accused of any sort of misconduct? No. It didn’t matter.
I faced a choice: get demoted or resign. I became the latest of a great many senior FBI special agents to walk out the door.
The specifics of my experience may be unique—details often are—but the broad strokes of the story have become unfortunately common in recent months, as more and more special agents are driven out of the Bureau on mere suspicion of political unreliability. These developments should be concerning to all Americans. In the past six months, the FBI—and, for that matter, the Department of Justice and intelligence community as a whole—has been forcing out a wide range of experienced personnel needed to protect our nation. Under Patel and Bongino, subject matter expertise and operational competence are readily sacrificed for ideological purity and the ceaseless politicization of the workforce. […]
Prior to that day, I had never faced any sort of disciplinary review or investigation. And to be clear, I was not accused of violating any rules or regulations this time either, nor had any of my cases fallen short of institutional standards. My only supposed sin was a long-standing friendship with an individual who appeared on Kash Patel’s enemies list, and against whom Dan Bongino had railed publicly. […]
Grassley blew a gasket over former President Bill Clinton’s brief conversation with then U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch in 2016. But he’s not concerned as Trump orders specific criminal investigations, the Justice Department fires career prosecutors, and the FBI punishes agents over perceived political beliefs.
On the contrary: in the Judiciary Committee’s July 1 news release, Grassley applauded Patel’s “willingness to work with me to establish renewed transparency and accountability.”
Iowa’s senior senator demonstrated his loyalty in countless ways the last time Trump was in office. His partisan approach to oversight flipped while Biden was president, often putting him at odds with the White House.
Those days are over. For the foreseeable future, Grassley will lead the Judiciary Committee’s effort to settle scores with the president’s political opponents, instead of asserting the role of Congress as a counterweight to the executive branch.
It appears Grassley will use his time left in the U.S. Senate (and his life) cementing his legacy not as a statesman, but rather as a sycophant for authoritarianism.
Chuck Grassley is the person most responsible for the demolition of Chuck Grassley’s reputation.