Grassley built a reputation for government oversight. Has he abandoned it under Trump?

WASHINGTON (AP) — As President Donald Trump’s top law enforcement officials were firing and forcing out waves of Justice Department veterans, Sen. Chuck Grassley denounced a “political infection” that had poisoned FBI leadership.

The Iowa Republican was not criticizing FBI Director Kash Patel or Attorney General Pam Bondi. In a July statement, he directed his ire at the FBI’s “extreme lack of effort” in investigating Democrat Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of state a decade ago.

Trump loyalists have roiled the Justice Department, shattering norms and leading to a mass exodus of veteran officials, but the 92-year-old chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee has remained focused on the past.

Critics say Grassley’s reluctance to challenge the Trump administration has even extended to a defining issue: His support for whistleblowers making claims of fraud, waste and abuse.

In an interview, Grassley insisted he has not abandoned his oversight role. He said he has felt compelled to investigate issues under earlier presidents to avoid a repeat of what he described as politically motivated prosecutions carried out against Trump and his allies.

“Political weaponization is being brought to the surface and being made more transparent because this administration is the most cooperative of any administration — Republican or Democrat,” Grassley said.

Grassley has acknowledged that Congress has ceded a great deal of power to the current administration, a concession he says makes his own oversight more crucial.

“It’s going to enhance the necessity for it,” he said.

Grassley is known for his focus on oversight

Grassley, upon entering Congress in 1975, quickly developed a reputation for exposing corruption and waste. He once drove to the Pentagon in his orange Chevy Chevette to demand answers from officials about their purchase of $450 hammers and $7,600 coffee pots.

He was among the chief proponents in Congress of laws to shield employees who revealed such waste and sponsored the landmark 1989 Whistleblower Protection Act. He also has played a key role in empowering inspectors general, internal watchdogs tasked with rooting out misconduct.

“He has been the conscience of the Senate on whistleblower protection rights for decades,” said Tom Devine, legal director for the Government Accountability Project. In the current Congress, he has co-sponsored legislation boosting protections for whistleblowers in the FBI and CIA.

“No one is close to having his impact,” Devine said. “That hardly means that we always agree with his judgment calls about policy.”

Criticized for not taking on Trump administration

Trump and Grassley are not always in alignment. This past week, for example, they tussled over the pace of confirmation of administration nominees.

Even so, Democrats and good government advocates say Grassley has been conspicuously silent as the administration has investigated Trump’s perceived enemies, fired agents who worked on politically sensitive cases and upended the Justice Department’s longstanding post-Watergate independence.

Some whistleblowers have been loath to trust him with revelations that might harm the administration, according to interviews with more than a dozen current and former U.S. officials, or their attorneys, several of whom spoke on condition of anonymity because they feared retaliation.

“There are a lot of people concerned he’s not the same old Chuck Grassley,” said Eric Woolson, author of a 1995 biography of Grassley who once served as a Grassley campaign spokesman.

Grassley rejected that criticism, saying whistleblowers call him regardless of who is in the White House. His office’s online portal has received more than 5,300 complaints in 2025, about the same level as past years, staffers reported.

“His entire career, he’s the guy people will trust,” said Jason Foster, a former chief investigative counsel to Grassley who founded Empower Oversight, a group that has advocated on behalf of FBI agents disciplined under the Biden administration.

Staunch Trump ally

Many of Grassley’s recent actions, however, suggest he has evolved from being a fiercely independent moderate eager to sniff out fraud to being a stalwart Trump ally, according to Democrats and whistleblower advocates.

Some were particularly alarmed at Grassley’s dismissal of witnesses who raised concerns about the June nomination of Emil Bove, a high-ranking Justice Department official and former Trump lawyer, to a lifetime federal appeals court seat.

Among several officials who came forward was Justice Department lawyer Erez Reuveni, who said he was fired for refusing to go along with Bove’s plans to defy court orders and withhold information from judges to advance the administration’s aggressive deportation goals.

Grassley said his staff tried to investigate some of the claims but that lawyers for one whistleblower would not give his staff all the materials they requested in time. Instead of delaying the hearing to dig further, Grassley circled the wagons behind Trump’s nominee.

The “vicious rhetoric, unfair accusations and abuse directed at Mr. Bove,” Grassley said in a speech, have “crossed the line.”

Stacey Young, a former Justice Department lawyer who founded Justice Connection, a network of department alumni mobilized to uphold the department’s traditionally apolitical workforce, said she was disappointed Grassley has not used his influence to condemn firings at the department.

“How is the congressional majority not screaming bloody murder? We are watching the near decimation of DOJ in real-time, and Congress is sitting by doing nothing,” she said. “Does Sen. Grassley think it’s OK that people get fired for doing their jobs?”

At a September oversight hearing, Grassley passed up a chance to grill Patel on a series of terminations of line agents and high-level supervisors, including five whose abrupt and still-unexplained dismissals had generated headlines weeks earlier.

When Democrats pressed Patel about his use of the bureau’s plane for personal reasons, Grassley chided Senate colleagues for their disinterest in the travel practices of previous directors.

Grassley has also been an eager conduit for an FBI leadership seeking to expose what it insists was misconduct and overreach in an investigation during the Biden administration into Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

He has released batches of sensitive documents from that investigation, known as “Arctic Frost,” that he says have been furnished by FBI whistleblowers or that have been labeled as “Produced by FBI Director Kash Patel.” The records are not the type of documents federal law enforcement would typically make public on its own.

Advocates dismayed over Grassley response to IG firings

Whistleblower advocates said they were dismayed when Grassley failed to take a robust stance when Trump, within days of taking office, fired without cause some inspectors general.

Even some Republican-appointed inspectors general accused Trump of violating a law requiring the White House to provide 30-day notice and rationale to Congress. If any Republican were going to stand up for them, some of the fired inspectors general said, they expected it to be Grassley.

“He has been uncharacteristically silent,” said Mark Greenblatt, a Trump appointee at the Interior Department who was among those fired. ”It is unimaginable that the Grassley of a few years ago, the man who held nominees and fired off blistering threats at the smallest provocation to protect inspectors general, would be so silent in the face of these assaults.”

Grassley responded to the purge by sending Trump a letter requesting officials “immediately” spell out their case-by-case specific reasons for the dismissals.

It took the White House eight months to respond. In a two-page letter, it reasserted presidential authority to fire inspectors general at will and made no attempt to explain its rationale other than to cite “changed priorities.”

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Associated Press writer Ryan J. Foley in Iowa City, Iowa, contributed to this report.