WASHINGTON (AP) — Sen. Chuck Grassley decried the “political infection” poisoning the FBI’s leadership as President Donald Trump’s top law enforcement officials fired and expelled scores of Justice Department veterans.
The Iowa Republican was not criticizing FBI Director Kash Patel or Attorney General Pam Bondi. In a statement in July, he expressed outrage at the FBI’s “extreme lack of effort” in investigating Democrat Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server when she was secretary of state a decade ago.
Trump supporters have disrupted the Justice Department and broken norms, leading to a mass exodus of senior officials, but the 92-year-old chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee remains focused on the past.
Critics say Grassley’s reluctance to challenge the Trump administration even extends to a defining issue: his support for whistleblowers who report fraud, waste and abuse.
In an interview, Grassley insisted he was not abdicating his supervisory duties. He said he felt compelled to investigate problems under the previous president to avoid a repeat of what he said were politically motivated prosecutions against Trump and his allies.
“The weaponization of politics is surfacing and becoming more transparent because this administration is the most cooperative of any administration, Republican or Democratic,” Grassley said.
Grassley acknowledged that Congress has ceded a significant amount of power to the current administration, a concession he said makes his own oversight more important.
“This will reinforce the need for it,” he said.
Grassley is known for his focus on oversight
After Grassley entered Congress in 1975, he quickly gained a reputation for exposing corruption and waste. He once drove his orange Chevrolet Chevette to the Pentagon and demanded answers from officials about their purchases of a $450 hammer and a $7,600 coffee pot.
He was one of the leading proponents of legislation in Congress to protect employees who expose such waste and sponsored the landmark Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989. He also played a key role in empowering the inspector general and internal watchdog responsible for rooting out misconduct.
“He has been the Senate’s conscience on whistleblower rights protections for decades,” said Tom Devine, legal director for the Government Accountability Project. In this Congress, he co-sponsored legislation that strengthened whistleblower protections for the FBI and CIA.
“No one has had the impact he had,” Devine said. “That doesn’t mean we always agree with his judgment on policy.”
Criticized for not taking on Trump administration
Trump and Grassley didn’t always see eye to eye. Last week, for example, they sparred over the pace of confirmation of the administration’s nominees.
Even so, Democrats and good administration supporters say Grassley has remained silent as the administration investigates Trump’s enemies, fires agents working on politically sensitive cases and upends the Justice Department’s long-standing post-Watergate independence.
Some whistleblowers have been reluctant to believe he would reveal information that could damage the government, according to interviews with more than a dozen current and former U.S. officials or their lawyers, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
“A lot of people are worried that he’s not the same Chuck Grassley anymore,” said Eric Woolson, the author of a 1995 Grassley biography and a former Grassley campaign spokesman.
Grassley rejected the criticism, saying whistleblowers would call him no matter who was in the White House. His office’s online portal has received more than 5,300 complaints in 2025, about the same as in previous years, staff said.
“Throughout his entire career, he was someone that people would trust,” said Jason Foster, Grassley’s former chief investigative counsel who founded Empower Oversight, a group that advocates on behalf of FBI agents who were disciplined under the Biden administration.
Trump’s staunch ally
Yet many of Grassley’s recent actions show that he has transformed from a fiercely independent moderate eager to sniff out fraud to a staunch ally of Trump, according to Democrats and whistleblower advocates.
Some were particularly alarmed by Grassley’s dismissal of witnesses who raised concerns about the June nomination of former Trump lawyer Emil Bove, a senior Justice Department official, to a lifetime federal appeals court seat.
Justice Department lawyer Erez Reuveni, one of several officials who came forward, said he was fired for refusing to comply with Bove’s plan, which violated court orders and withheld information from judges to advance the administration’s aggressive deportation goals.
Grassley said his staff tried to investigate some of the allegations, but a whistleblower’s attorney would not provide his staff with all the materials they requested in a timely manner. Rather than delay the hearing to dig further, Grassley circled the wagons behind Trump’s nominee.
Grassley said in a speech that the “vicious rhetoric, unfair accusations and abuse directed at Mr. Bough” had “crossed a line.”
Former Justice Department attorney Stacey Young founded Justice Connection, a network of Justice Department alumni mobilizing to defend the Justice Department’s traditionally apolitical workforce. She said she was disappointed that Grassley did not use his influence to condemn the Justice Department firings.
“How come the majority in Congress isn’t screaming bloody murder? We are witnessing the near-destruction of the Department of Justice in real time while Congress stands by and does nothing,” she said. “Does Senator Grassley think it’s okay for people to be fired for doing their jobs?”
At an oversight hearing in September, Grassley missed an opportunity to question Patel about the firings of a series of line agents and senior executives, including five who had made headlines weeks earlier with their sudden and still unexplained firings.
As Democrats pressed Patel to use the bureau’s planes for personal reasons, Grassley accused Senate colleagues of being disinterested in the former director’s travel practices.
Grassley also has been an ardent conduit for FBI leadership in trying to expose what it insists was misconduct and overreach in the Biden administration’s investigation into Trump’s overturning of the 2020 election.
He released a batch of sensitive documents from that investigation, called “Arctic Frost,” which he said were provided by FBI whistleblowers or were labeled “produced by FBI Director Kash Patel.” These records are not the type of documents that federal law enforcement agencies typically release on their own.
Advocates frustrated by Grassley’s reaction to IG firing
Whistleblower advocates said they were frustrated by Grassley’s failure to take a tough stance after Trump fired some inspectors general without cause just days after taking office.
Even some Republican-appointed inspectors general have accused Trump of violating a law that requires the White House to provide Congress with 30 days’ notice and justification. Some of the fired inspectors general said if any Republican was willing to come out in support of them, they expected it would be Grassley.
“He’s been uncharacteristically silent,” said Mark Greenblatt, a Trump appointee to the Interior Department and one of those fired. “It’s unimaginable that Grassley, who just a few years ago was making fierce threats at the slightest provocation in order to protect the Inspector General, with his nomination in hand, would be so silent in the face of these attacks.”
Grassley sent a letter to Trump asking officials to “immediately” detail the specific reasons for the firings on a case-by-case basis.
It took eight months for the White House to respond. In a two-page letter, it reiterated the president’s authority to fire inspectors general at will without attempting to explain its rationale other than to cite “changes in priorities.”
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Associated Press writer Ryan J. Foley in Iowa City, Iowa, contributed to this report.
