Floor Remarks by Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa
“Progressive Prosecutors Are Destroying Our Country’s Future”
Monday, June 3, 2024
A presidential campaign and political party misreported payments to lawyers as legal expenses and, thus, violated the law.
Am I referring to Donald Trump’s trial?
No. I’m referring to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Hillary Clinton campaign.
In the 2016 presidential election cycle, they improperly reported money used to fund the Steele Dossier as legal expenses. In doing so, they hid its true purpose, which was opposition research against Trump.
The Federal Election Commission held, six years later, that it found probable cause that the DNC and Clinton Campaign violated federal law.
They were fined over $100,000.
Were they criminally prosecuted? Of course not.
The now-debunked Steele Dossier threw our country into crisis for years. In 2020, Senator Johnson of Wisconsin and I were able to get once-classified information, declassified.
That declassified information showed Christopher Steele’s sources were connected to the Russian government, supported Hillary Clinton, and that Russian intelligence was aware of Steele’s anti-Trump work even before the FBI started their investigation.
This is information the Justice Department failed to tell the FISA court.
The Justice Department failed to even apprise the FISA court that the FBI had a counterintelligence case on one of Steele’s key sources.
The Clinton campaign and the DNC colluded with Russians.
They used a former British spy, Fusion GPS and a law firm to create a fake dossier, and then tried to cover it up by misreporting it under federal election rules.
Crossfire Hurricane is a textbook example of government weaponization. It was a “get Trump at all costs” approach.
And now, that weaponization has moved to the judicial system – our last line of defense against partisan political cancer.
District Attorney Bragg manufactured a crime by reviving a time-barred, state-based misdemeanor for allegedly falsifying business records. To revive the alleged crime and elevate it to a felony, he alleged it was done in furtherance of another crime.
He also alleged interference in the 2016 election by Donald Trump.
What were the other crimes? Violations of federal election law, tax law and other business records.
The judge allowed District Attorney Bragg to essentially prosecute alleged federal violations in state court, but because it was in state court, Bragg couldn’t actually charge Trump for those further crimes, which were federal in nature.
What an absolute mess and scary precedent this partisan process has created. That’s going to be a sore on public policy, statutory law and precedent, to be carried on by other prosecutors in the future.
This was a case that Bragg initially declined to prosecute, just as his predecessor declined to prosecute. And that was a case that federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York declined and so, too, did the Federal Election Commission.
Now, that prosecutor in Manhattan that failed to prosecute the same things that Bragg prosecuted, was a well-respected Cyrus Vance Jr. Now, we have Bragg taking up what an outstanding prosecutor by the name of Vance would not do.
Even liberal legal analysts have noted that this case wouldn’t have been brought against anyone other than Trump.
A state prosecutor has no jurisdiction over a federal crime, whereas the Justice Department does.
And here, the Justice Department and Federal Election Commission have exclusive jurisdiction over these kinds of matters.
The Biden Justice Department didn’t do anything to assert its jurisdictional hook as it routinely does when, for example, states file lawsuits involving federal immigration law.
Biden’s number three official at the Justice Department, Matthew Colangelo, left that perch to work as a line prosecutor in Bragg’s office for this specific prosecution. Eventually, the zombie case against Trump – as it’s been described by legal scholars – was revived just in time for the 2024 presidential election cycle. In fact, the grand jury came out with a verdict less than two months after Trump announced for reelection.
Then, the judge allowed the jury to pick from not one, but three, different secondary crimes I mentioned earlier that Trump allegedly committed to impact the 2016 election.
This means jurors could disagree on the crime, yet the judge would still consider the verdict unanimous to convict.
As Andrew McCarthy said in his June 1, 2024 article, “the jurors were told that they needn’t agree on what unlawful conduct Trump had engaged in to conspire to corrupt the election (which, remember, was not charged in the indictment).”
This is a judge who reportedly contributed to a group “dedicated to resisting the Republican Party and Donald Trump’s radical right-wing legacy.”
As Andrew McCarthy wrote in his article, “How can there be guilt beyond a reasonable doubt if the jury doesn’t agree on whether prosecutors have proved a key element of the case?”
I could go on and on about the defects in this political persecution.
What concerns me most is the damage it’s done to our American institutions.
Federal law enforcement, the intelligence community and now, the judicial branch, have contorted themselves and, at the same time, tried to destroy Trump.
In the process, they’ve broken faith with the law, with the rules, with ethics, with the truth and with the American people.
The steel and concrete foundations of our law enforcement and judicial institutions are breaking apart, piece by piece, bit by bit.
It’s not the American people who are doing it. It’s those charged with running the institutions who are responsible for their shockingly quick decline.
That decline won’t stop any time soon, so long as the left and their allies in the media continue to use the judicial system to destroy their enemies based upon make-believe cases.
The left-wing’s lawfare crusade has given them what they’ve wanted for a decade now: Donald Trump’s conviction on something, anything, just a conviction.
But what the left-wing has failed to foresee is the aftermath of their injecting partisan political cancer into our once storied institutions.
That is, they run the catastrophic risk of the American people not caring anymore. The Justice Department indicted someone on major criminal charges? Well, many people may react with doubt about the merits and integrity of that indictment because of the Justice Department’s past political decisions.
The FBI arrested a major criminal? Well, many people may begin to question whether the person arrested is now part of a political persecution based on made up information like what happened with the FISA court and Crossfire Hurricane and everything involving Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.
A Democratic judge and prosecution team tried and convicted a Republican in a district that’s almost 90 percent Democratic voters? They asked to go somewhere else where they might get a fairer trial, but they got a quick “no.”
I hope you get the picture. That’s why millions of Americans refuse to take this sham conviction very seriously.
Trust is easy to lose, but trust is hard to gain.
As Andrew McCarthy stated in his excellent analysis: “What happened in Manhattan was monstrous. The fallout is the antithesis of a constitutional republic that presumes innocence, imposes the burden of proof on the state, venerates its due-process rules, and guarantees equal protection of law. The antithesis is now the norm. Regardless of what happens to Donald Trump, all of us will live to regret it.”
Ultimately, only We the People can solve the constitutional crisis that politicians, law enforcement and judicial officials have disgracefully created.
-30-