Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley used an oversight hearing with FBI Director Kash Patel to release internal bureau emails that he says reveal a recurring pattern of federal agents pursuing investigations of Donald Trump and his allies on thin or nonexistent grounds.
Grassley, the Iowa Republican who has spent years prying documents out of federal law enforcement agencies, opened the hearing by laying out what he described as fresh proof that the pattern did not end with the Crossfire Hurricane investigation into alleged Trump-Russia collusion, it kept going, touching figures from Michael Flynn to Elon Musk. Just the News reported on the newly released records and their connection to earlier declassified materials that have surfaced over the past year.
The emails span several years and several targets. Taken together, they outline a sequence in which individual FBI agents pushed to open or join politically sensitive cases, sometimes over the objections of colleagues, and sometimes without the factual basis the bureau's own procedures demand.
One of the most striking records Grassley highlighted was a February 2025 email from Kevin Gounaud, a now-former FBI agent. Gounaud proposed opening a criminal investigation into Elon Musk, the tech executive who was leading government efficiency efforts as a special government employee in the Trump administration.
Gounaud's theory: Musk's push to have federal workers share weekly accomplishments by email amounted to a criminal act. The agent alleged the practice "encouraged, abetted, aided, etc. thousands if not tens of thousands of government employees to violate government wide security policy and transmit sensitive government information." He closed with a line that Grassley made sure the committee heard.
"And no, I'm not kidding."
Grassley presented the email as evidence that the impulse to weaponize federal law enforcement against political figures close to Trump persisted well beyond the Russia investigation era. The article does not specify whether Gounaud's proposed probe was ever formally opened or rejected.
A second set of emails focused on FBI Agent Walter Giardina, who repeatedly tried to attach himself to the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, the bureau's probe of alleged ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. Giardina's first documented outreach came on January 20, 2017, the day of Trump's first inauguration, when he emailed fellow agent Joe Pientka.
"I wanted to mention again my interest in joining the case."
Grassley's review of the records showed Giardina contacted the Crossfire Hurricane team a total of seven times. He offered investigators what the records describe as a new angle involving campaign fundraising. The case line Giardina proposed did not advance.
Giardina's name had surfaced before. Grassley previously identified him as part of a team of FBI agents who appeared to celebrate the 2022 indictment of Trump adviser Peter Navarro. That earlier disclosure, which the chairman highlighted last year, fit the same pattern: declassified FBI files have repeatedly shown individual agents and officials inside the bureau treating politically charged cases involving Trump associates with something closer to enthusiasm than detachment.
Grassley also drew attention to documents released just last week by the White House Government Transparency Task Force, fully unredacted, declassified handwritten notes from the January 24, 2017 FBI interview of Michael Flynn, Trump's incoming national security adviser.
Flynn had voluntarily sat down with agents Pientka and Peter Strzok just days after the inauguration. The interview centered on Flynn's contacts with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, including at least one phone call on December 20, 2016, the same day the Obama administration expelled 35 Russian diplomats and authorized a government response to Russian cyber operations. Flynn was on a Christmas vacation in the Dominican Republic at the time and later recalled making four or five calls that day.
The newly unredacted notes reveal discrepancies with the official FD-302, the typed interview summary the FBI enters into its records system. That FD-302 was not filed until more than 20 days after the interview itself. It was later used to underpin Flynn's prosecution.
Pientka's handwritten notes contain a notation apparently attributed to Flynn: "Hey, don't do anything." Strzok's notes recorded Flynn saying: "If so, don't remember. If so, busy place to make phone calls." Those hedging, informal responses sit uneasily beside the government's later assertion that Flynn lied to the agents, an assertion serious enough to produce a federal charge of one count of false statements in Washington, D.C., and eventually a plea deal.
The broader Crossfire Hurricane investigation itself was built on a foundation that Special Counsel John Durham's final report later found to be hollow. Durham concluded the FBI had no verified intelligence or evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian officials when the probe was opened. The bureau relied on the Steele Dossier, co-funded by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, to secure FISA surveillance warrants against Trump campaign associate Carter Page. Declassified intelligence also showed the Obama administration had been briefed in the summer of 2016 on a Clinton campaign plan to tie Trump to Russia.
That sequence, a politically motivated theory, thin evidence, aggressive pursuit, and belated accountability, is precisely what Grassley argues the new emails show repeating itself across different cases and different years. As previously reported, the White House has declassified records showing the FBI went so far as to open a covert probe treating Trump himself as a potential Russian asset after the firing of then-Director James Comey.
The hearing also revisited internal FBI memos and emails about the August 8, 2022 raid on Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, authorized by then-Attorney General Merrick Garland. Those records were declassified last year by FBI Director Patel and then-Attorney General Pam Bondi.
The memos showed that FBI agents in the Washington Field Office raised serious doubts about the scope of the search warrant. Agents questioned the justification for searching Trump's private areas, including his personal office and bedroom. They noted the bureau had not generated new facts or evidence to support the expanded search parameters DOJ officials were demanding.
Biden-era DOJ officials pushed to expand the warrant anyway and rejected FBI recommendations to seek cooperation or reach an accommodation with Trump's legal team. George Toscas, then a deputy assistant attorney general, was memorialized in the records as brushing aside concerns about political fallout. His response, as captured in the internal documents:
"frankly doesn't give a d*** about the optics."
That attitude, the willingness to override the bureau's own field agents and dismiss the political dimensions of raiding a former president's home, fits the pattern Grassley has spent years documenting. It is the same institutional posture that produced the Crossfire Hurricane probe, the Flynn prosecution, and, more recently, the proposed Musk investigation: a readiness to act first and justify later, with the targets consistently drawn from the same political orbit.
The legal battles surrounding former FBI Director James Comey have added yet another layer to the picture of an agency whose leadership repeatedly treated investigations involving Trump and his circle differently than it treated anyone else.
In his opening statement, Grassley framed the new disclosures as part of a pattern stretching back almost ten years. He did not mince words about what the records show.
"For almost a decade now, I've made records public showing how a number of now discredited law enforcement and intelligence officials schemed to take out Trump and other Republicans. And here we are, in 2026, still finding records from years ago showing even more evidence of targeting."
The chairman's frustration is understandable. Each new batch of declassified documents, from the Crossfire Hurricane files to the Flynn interview notes to the Mar-a-Lago raid memos to Gounaud's Musk email, tells the same basic story. Individual agents and DOJ officials pursued politically sensitive investigations with minimal evidence, overrode internal objections, and relied on processes that later proved flawed or misleading.
And as declassified FBI memos have shown, the bureau's willingness to treat a sitting president as a counterintelligence target was not an aberration but a feature of the institution's posture during that era.
Several questions remain unanswered. What happened to Gounaud's proposed Musk probe? What did Giardina's "campaign fundraising" angle actually involve? How many additional discrepancies exist between the Flynn interview notes and the FD-302 beyond the two examples now public? And what, if anything, did FBI Director Patel tell the committee about reforms to prevent the cycle from continuing?
The documents keep coming because the pattern never stopped. Until the institutions responsible for it face real consequences, not just embarrassing headlines, there is no reason to expect it will.
