BUTLER COUNTY, IOWA – U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, joined Miranda Devine’s “Pod Force One” podcast to discuss a range of topics, including his congressional oversight, whistleblower advocacy, family farming background and what makes Iowa ‘the best of flyover country.’
Video and excerpts of Grassley’s remarks follow.
On President Trump’s second administration:
“We have had the most cooperation in the second Trump administration that I've had under any Republican or Democrat administration in the past, getting information. It hasn't been as easy as it should have been, considering the fact that we all know how everybody for the last 10 years has either been trying to impeach Trump out of office, keep him from getting in office or putting him in prison. You know, you’d think that with all that happening over the last 10 years, we shouldn't have any trouble from anybody in the Trump administration. It's just like pulling teeth, but I'm telling you, I'm astounded with what we have been able to get out of this administration...
"My motive is to make sure that we have transparency of everything that was covered up in previous administrations – make it public, the government being more transparent brings accountability – and then, in turn, [to] discourage it from happening in the future...
“Trump has been so mistreated ever since he went down that famous escalator... So, I'm chairman of this Judiciary Committee, doing my oversight work. I want to make sure that the public knows how Trump was mistreated... I hope if [anybody is] prosecuted, and they’re guilty, they go to jail. But right now, I just want to make sure that the world knows how Trump's been treated since the very minute he came down that [escalator].
“...I think [Trump was mistreated] because he's a threat to the status quo…He came to town to stir things up, and I don't think he knew how to do it in his first term, but he did stir things up an awful lot. But then he's out of office four years, and he knows how this game is played in this town. He knows where the skeletons are buried, in which closet, he knows who to force a deal with. Most importantly, he knows what he didn't do right the first term, and he's not going to make that same mistake again... I think now his presidency will look pretty darn good compared to the other 45 people that served in that office.”
On the FBI’s treatment of the Hillary Clinton investigation versus Trump investigations:
“Well, everything was thrown against Trump. It was all made public at the time they were doing it. What we are learning now is the scheming that went on to make the cases that Jack Smith brought against Trump, and those things are just the weaponization of the powers of government, particularly the FBI and the Department of Justice.
“It's just the opposite in the case of the Clinton emails. It was using the power of government to cover up, with the idea that we’ve got to get Clinton elected, [because] we can't let Trump get elected. [The FBI] knew about things that should have been investigated – how she misused the email process, on her own private server... They knew about it, and they didn't do anything to follow through on any of it. So, what we have recently released is the information that proves that the FBI was not doing its job. And by not doing its job, it was covering up all the misdeeds of the Clinton emails.”
On how Grassley approaches his work:
“I like to just do my work and let the chips fall where they may, and I don't care what people think about me. I'm not going to compare myself to anybody else. I'm just Chuck Grassley, farmer from Iowa. A person who loves serving in the United States [Senate], serving the American people. Trying to make our government work the way the constitutional writers intended this to work, checks and balances and all of that stuff, and pass on to the next generation a better country than I inherited.”
On Grassley’s upbringing and farming background:
“I was lucky enough to be in a family that was small farmers. [I had] a mother that was a one-room schoolteacher for maybe four or five years of her life, a woman that ended up upholstering furniture in her home to make a little bit of money that the little farm didn't produce. And they were good citizens, and they voted. They were never involved in politics, but they were always talking history and government...
“You may wonder how I became a farmer, but...the only thing I had in my mind [was that] I was either going to be a professor of political science or be in politics itself. And then Dad died in 1960, and Mom wanted to stay on the farm, and that's how I got into farming.”
On what farming has taught him:
“[I have an] appreciation of laboring men and women of America and what they do... Today, in 2025, two percent of the people in America feed the other 98 percent and send a third of their production overseas in exports. And I think, since I became a farmer when Dad died, I have a better way of expressing, with some real experience, what it is to be a farmer in the United States and [I can] speak on farm policy to a greater extent and with some authority.”
On MAHA and the importance of family farming:
“If you looked at corporation farms [and] if you looked at state-run farms like the Soviet system had, the family farm operation with private ownership of land is the most productive you can have.
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“[Secretary Kennedy] raises some things that are very questioning by farmers, and yet he says he knows how important farm[ing] is, and he wants farmers to be productive. He uses the term ‘regenerative agriculture.’ I'm trying to find out exactly what regenerative agriculture is... Two percent of the people can't produce the food for the rest of country if you're going to have...more labor intensive [operations], as opposed to machinery intensive... But I think he can be educated.”
“[Washington, D.C. is] an island that's surrounded by reality. The real America is what you call flyover country. And Iowa is the best of flyover country.
“...[W]e have so many firsts in our history – the first woman to become a lawyer, the first black person to become a lawyer, things of that nature. That's something to be proud of, and that goes back 180 years.”
On Grassley’s bipartisan reputation:
“I always say, go to the Georgetown University website and click on the Senator Lugar Center. They do a survey every year of bipartisanship, and I've always come out in the top 12...
“There is too much partisanship in today's government, particularly in the Congress of the United States... I like to explain to people that in the United States Senate, because of the 60-vote requirement to stop debate before you get to finality on a bill, you’ve got to have some bipartisanship or nothing’s ever going to get done. So, I think that the partisanship is overblown by journalists that always like to talk about disagreement.
“You’d never know that Senator Durbin and Grassley [worked] together on a piece of legislation that we called the [First] Step Act, to have criminal justice reform for the first time in a generation. We never get any credit for working together on that, but when we're disagreeing on immigration, that hits the headlines. So, don't you see how people get a distorted view of how much partisanship there is? Now, I'm telling you for a second time, there's too much partisanship, but not as much as the people in this country think there is.”
On why partisanship has increased over time:
“Congress is supposed to represent the people of America. All you’ve got to do to answer your question is look at the presidential voting map. The middle of the country is all Red, and the rest of the country is Blue along the shores. So, if the people of this country vote in a partisan way, wouldn't you expect – if you believe in representative government – wouldn't that be reflected in the Congress of the United States? And it is reflected in the Congress the United States that way.”
On congressional oversight and former FBI Director Christopher Wray’s failure to be responsive:
“When Pam Bondi came in for confirmation to my office...I gave her a file of 158 letters that the previous DOJ had not answered and probably half of those were [what] FBI never got answered… [Wray] didn't respond to them and probably intended never to respond to them. Now, I wouldn't want to say I [never] got a letter here and there on something, but [they didn’t answer] our questions or [give] us the documents we wanted.
“My oversight is based on the proposition that Congress not only passes bills and appropriates money and then we forget about it. No. Under checks and balances that you learn in eighth grade civics, we have a responsibility to make the President of the United States – and it doesn't matter to me whether he’s a Republican or Democrat – faithfully executes those laws and faithfully expends that money the way it is...”
On Grassley’s whistleblower advocacy:
“Now, I get most of my information from whistleblowers, patriotic people that want nothing more than to make sure the government does what the law says the government should do. They've probably gone to somebody higher in their department to get some correction made, they don't get it, so then they come to Chuck Grassley.
“If everybody looked after [whistleblowers], things would be different... I tell people that are heads of these [federal] departments... ‘You’ve got to listen to whistleblowers. You're [the] head of an agency that's got 10,000 people, or you might be head of the VA that's got 400,000 people. You don’t know what's going on down below. The whistleblowers are just patriotic people. You ought to listen to them and if you listen to them, all these corrections would be made, [and] they won't have to come to me.’”
On Grassley’s investigations into the Biden family:
“[I investigated Hunter Biden] starting in 2019 – even before [Joe] Biden announced his presidency, because everybody was saying we're doing it because [his] dad's running for president. He wasn't running for president at the time we opened this investigation…
“We had whistleblowers that came to us and told us how bad the situation was. We needed information, and eventually we issued a preliminary report of 2020, then a fuller report later on… I gave a speech, and I put pictures of all these financial transactions, the checks that were written...I put it up on the Senate Floor so the whole world could see it.”
On Democrat obstruction and false allegations during the Kavanaugh hearings:
“Kavanaugh was up [for a hearing] and I was opening the meeting, giving my opening statement – I got two words out of my mouth, and one Democrat after the other just suggested we adjourn. I said, ‘You don't adjourn hearings, you only adjourn executive committee meetings.’ But that went on for a couple hours, and I just let them harangue about it. I think I made my Republicans mad because I didn't cut [the Democrats] off.
“But I've come to the conclusion, after a lot of years in the United States Senate, that it’s easier to let people talk. It takes longer to shut them up, so I just let them talk. But instead of getting done at two o'clock in the afternoon, we got done about five o'clock in the afternoon. I think we started at nine or 10 o'clock in the morning, but [Democrats] ate up a good two or three hours trying to shut the whole Kavanaugh hearing down.
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"I think the Democrats thought they could stop [Kavanaugh] by his not being able to answer the questions. And so, once he was able to show that he could answer their questions, maybe [he didn’t] satisfy them, but he satisfied the public. He was explaining what he was going to do as a member of the Supreme Court. Then they went after his personal character.
“For the next 10 days to two weeks, we had to battle that. And we even had 24 people come in...and they made these accusations, and I think we had to track down 27 accusations. Not a one of them stuck, and four of them were so bad that we had to turn their names over to the Justice Department for lying under oath to the United States Senate, because they were under oath...
“I referred them for prosecution because my staff spent a lot of days and maybe weekends running all these leads down, and they didn't lead anywhere, and they just ate up a lot of time. I wanted to refer at least the four people who lied to Congress that they ought to be prosecuted to tell the rest of the country, ‘Don't come to the United States Senate with a bunch of lies about ruining somebody's character. You want us to do our work in an open way and transparent way, and if you take an oath, you’ve got to abide by the oath.’ I wanted to discourage that to people in the future.”
On the lack of civil discourse at today’s universities:
“Ninety percent of the professors at universities are Democrats, but the whole definition of a university is [it] ought to be where a controversy runs rampant. Where I can sit down with you, you can be a Democrat, and I’m a Republican. You can be a Communist, and I can be a Libertarian. We'll discuss things and appreciate each other's views, but we're going to learn from each other...
“But if that can't be done at universities, then you're wondering why it can't be done with the Congress of the United States. We need a whole reform of a university – [it] ought to be where you respect each other's point of view and learn from each other... It's got to be fixed from within. Now, I know Trump is trying to fix it. He can make a dent in it, but...it ought to be revolutionized.
“When I was studying at [the] University of Iowa to work on a PhD – which I never finished because I got elected to the [state] legislature – it was where you could have all this discussion. And it was really a learning process, and nobody got mad at anybody else.”
On Grassley’s wife and family:
“We've been married [over] 70 years now... She was working in Waterloo, Iowa, and I was a student at University of Northern Iowa, and we met on a blind date... [E]ight months later, we were married.
“She then started college the same time I did, and then we had two or three children at that point. She left college and didn't finish it until forty years later. [I]n 1983 she got her degree...
“We have five children, and I was in politics or farming, and then moon lighting in the factory and things of that nature. So she was mother and father to the kids. I just have to say I wouldn't be in the Senate today if I didn't have a wife like Barbara Grassley...”
On Grassley’s secrets to success:
“Always tell the truth...
“Know your stuff before you talk about it.
“And for a United States Senator, [hire] very dependable, smart staff.”
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