Floor Remarks by Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa
Senate President Pro Tempore
“Durham Annex and Political Weaponization”
Saturday, August 2, 2025
Once again, I’m going to remind people that there was some wrong done by the U.S. government between the periods of about six years ago to 10 years ago.
And, the taxpayers of this country might wonder why a senator is bringing this stuff up.
It involves government cover up. The public's business always ought to be public.
And if there is government cover up, we need to make sure that the public knows about it and [that] people in government know about it [who] might be wanting to cover up things today.
So, they learn a lesson that, I hope I can say, that nobody is going to get away with wrongdoing if they're working for the United States government.
So here I go on something that most people would consider history, but it's got a present-day purpose for doing.
As part of my longstanding oversight of the FBI’s discredited Crossfire Hurricane investigation into President Trump, this week I made public a formerly classified document.
Probably, most of it shouldn’t have been classified in the first place. That’s the way the government does things to cover up.
The American people deserve to see the facts that the FBI previously buried. This document, known as the “Durham annex,” contains intelligence suggesting Hillary Clinton’s campaign fabricated the Trump-Russia narrative in 2016.
But the FBI turned a blind eye to the evidence. In other words, it was used as a political weapon.
The American people deserve full transparency about the FBI’s failure to investigate this intelligence and related records so that America’s law enforcement agencies and intelligence community aren’t weaponized again.
I’m grateful to Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel for working with me to totally bring this information to light.
And it's just not those two people that President Trump has appointed. But other people like Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence, has done in other ways, things that were buried by previous administrations that she's making public knowledge of.
And I could say very generally that the Trump administration is better than any Republican or Democratic administration in the past of trying to get some of this wrongdoing out and declassifying stuff that shouldn't been classified in the first place.
Now, what I've just told you is not the end of the story. There’s a lot more to uncover, and you can expect more documents to be released from this senator in the coming months.
This is not a Republican issue. This is not a Democrat issue. This is an issue of the bureaucracy — in this case, the FBI — being used as a political weapon, covering up.
In fact, some of these documents that I released, Director Patel told me — and I think he also told the public this — that they found some of this evidence in what the FBI would call a “burn bag.”
So, we got to make sure that this stuff doesn’t happen again.
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