Free Republic

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) called on the State Department to turn over documents related to Hillary Clinton’s top aide Cheryl Mills’ special employment status at the agency in a letter to Secretary John Kerry on Monday. Grassley also demanded to know why the State Department omitted Mills from a list of “special government employees,” or “SGEs,” for 2009 that it turned over to the Senate Judiciary Committee last year. The State Department told the Washington Free Beacon last month that Mills was an “SGE” in 2009, which freed her from some ethics rules restrictions and allowed...

Democrats have rolled out a proposal that would restore a key provision of the Voting Rights Act that the Supreme Court struck down in 2013. The bill, introduced by Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Chris Coons (D-Del.), would establish a new formula to determine which state and local governments are required to get approval before changing their voting laws. Under the legislation, states that have a "record of racial discrimination" within the past 25 years would need federal approval to change their voting laws, according to a fact sheet from Leahy's office. The proposal would also allow...

The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee accused the FBI on Monday of not cooperating with the Department of Justice’s top watchdog in the investigation of the Fast and Furious gunrunning scandal, among others, endangering Congress’s ability to be a check on the administration’s actions

Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) has sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder expressing deep concerns over Veterans Affairs evaluations classifying veterans as "mentally defective" and banning them in the federal background check system from purchasing or owning a firearm. According to Grassley's office, the VA "reports individuals to the gun ban list if an individual merely needs financial assistance managing VA benefits," keeping them from exercising their Second Amendment rights. (Bolding is mine) "The National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) is effectively a national gun ban list and placement on the list precludes...

Ten U.S. senators, representing the political spectrum, are seeking a federal investigation into displacement of IT workers by H-1B-using contractors. They are asking the U.S. Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security and the Labor Department to investigate the use of the H-1B program "to replace large numbers of American workers" at Southern California Edison (SCE) and other employers. (SNIP) The other signers are Sens. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.), a longtime ally of Grassley on H-1B issues; Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), David Vitter (R-La.), Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), Bill Cassidy (R-La.), Bernard Sanders (I-Vt.), James Inhofe...

The State Department’s inspector general has agreed to investigate the program that allowed former Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton to hire one of her key advisors, Huma Abedin, for government work even as she was also employed by a private firm, a senator revealed Friday. Inspector General Steve A. Linick also said he wasn’t aware of Mrs. Clinton’s or Ms. Abedin’s use of a non-government email account to conduct official business, and said that’s generally been frowned upon at the department. He pointed to a 2012 report that instructed an embassy to stop using a commercial email system as evidence. And...

He has never won re-election with less than 64 percent of the vote. His approval rating is 67 percent. This is not some senator from a deep red or deep blue state. He is, in fact, a Republican representing a swing state in a presidential year, and Democrats would quite like to unseat him. So why does Sen. Charles E. Grassley seem almost politically invincible? (SNIP) Democrats looking to topple him will not have an easy path. His lowest re-election margin of victory was 64 percent in 2010. (He won 66 percent of the vote in 1986, 70 percent in...

Senate Republicans are renewing efforts to learn why Huma Abedin, a top assistant to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, was allowed to keep working at the agency under a special, part-time status while also being employed at a politically-connected consulting firm. The new requests are being made by Iowa GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, following revelations that both women used a private Internet server and email accounts for State Department correspondence. Grassley says the earlier requests to the department have been largely ignored, ~snip~ Grassley’s probe started in 2013, when he requested all communications between...

A federal whistleblower claims a division of the Department of Justice is using money from asset forfeitures to pay for custom wallpaper, artwork, crown moldings and chair rails in its offices. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, has asked U.S. Marshals Service Director Stacia A. Hylton to answer claims about how the Asset Forfeiture Division spent forfeited money, including a report that more than $10,000 was used to purchase a single conference room table. "If so, what was the cost and why was a less expensive table not considered?"

WASHINGTON -- The furor over Hillary Clinton's decision to conduct her government communications through a personal, hideaway, email account isn't going away. Clinton's abbreviated, 20-minute news conference Tuesday raised more questions than answers. The chief one: Who gave her the right to determine which emails were personal and thus deleted? Not only is the secret email revelation growing into a politically damaging story, the Senate Judiciary Committee is also investigating a little-known government program Clinton used where some of her top political agents worked for her at the State Department while still in private employment. When the blockbuster story broke...

U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, delivered this week’s Republican address on bipartisan legislation to curb domestic human trafficking.  The legislation passed in the committee by a unanimous vote and will be considered by the full Senate next week.Grassley’s address is available in video and audio formats. You can view the video and a full transcript of Grassley’s remarks are below: “I’m U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa. “This year, thousands of minors will be sexually trafficked in the United States. “Through threats or deceit human traffickers will force children and teenagers into servitude for cheap...

A phenomenal thing has happened in Washington: Progressive advocates and conservative forces have united around legislative action supported by the strong majority of the American people. Groups as disparate as the Center for American Progress and ACLU on the left and the Koch Brothers on the right; Republican Sen. Rand Paul and Democratic Sen. Cory Booker; and over two-thirds of the American people all support major overhauls to America's criminal justice system. (SNIP) Yet it would appear Grassley just doesn't wanna change the rules. Grassley is the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Simply put, given the generally powerful position...

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley sent a letter on Friday to DHS Sec. Jeh Johnson questioning whether the suspected killer of Mirjana Puhar, a former contestant on “America’s Next Top Model,” was an illegal immigrant who applied for amnesty under President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). Emmanuel Jesus Rangel-Hernandez, a 19-year-old reputed gang member, was charged with first-degree murder in the death of Puhar, also 19, and three others in Charlotte, North Carolina earlier this week.

Voters in three critical swing states, Colorado, Iowa and Virginia, give their governors good job approval ratings and are strongly optimistic about the next three or four years in their states under their current governors, according to a Quinnipiac University Swing State Poll released today. Job approval ratings for U.S. Senators in the three states range from a better than 3-1 score for Iowa's Chuck Grassley to a lackluster grade for Colorado's Cory Gardner and Michael Bennet, the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pe-ack) University Poll finds. The Swing State Poll focuses on key states in the presidential election. (SNIP) Do you approve...

Southern California Edison (SCE) IT workers replaced by H-1B contractors have become the latest Exhibit A in Congress for reformers of the visa program. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who has long advocated for changes to the H-1B program to protect U.S. workers, said the Edison layoffs illustrate how some employers "are potentially using legal avenues to import foreign workers, lay-off qualified Americans, and then export jobs overseas. "I was shocked by the heartless manner in which U.S. workers were injured," said Grassley in a Senate floor speech Wednesday. (SNIP) "The sponsors of the bill claim it will 'boost our competitiveness...

One thousand of the 36,000 illegal immigrant criminals the government released in 2013 have gone on to commit other crimes, including child sex abuse, hit-and-run and child cruelty, according to new data released Friday evening by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley. The information, which the Homeland Security Department provided to Mr. Grassley, details all 1,000 convictions including dozens of drunk-driving convictions, drug offenses and weapons convictions. But the more serious crimes include domestic abuse, carjacking and aggravated assault. One of the illegal immigrants, identified as No. 960, was subsequently convicted of inflicting injury on a domestic partner; child...

It wasn't long ago that Sen. Jeff Sessions was waging a lonely battle against comprehensive immigration reform. ABC News called the Alabama Republican a "lone wolf" in his dogged quest to kill the Senate's immigration reform bill, which passed the upper chamber in June 2013 on a 68-32 bipartisan vote. At one point, Sessions introduced an amendment to slash the number of immigrants allowed to enter the country legally—not even Texas firebrand Ted Cruz voted for it. (SNIP) Not long before his nomination, Sessions had prosecuted three civil rights activists, a group known as the Marion Three that included a...

U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) once supported President Reagan’s amnesty for illegal aliens back in the 1980’s, but has since stated that he and others made a mistake in doing so. He now supports a piece-meal approach to immigration reform as opposed to a comprehensive approach to fixing the existing immigration problem. During a brief Q & A with the veteran Senator at the Iowa Freedom Summit in Des Moines, Grassley laid out what he feels first needs to be done in any immigration reform bill and then talks about what he feels his colleague Senator Ted Cruz is doing...

Senate Republicans are throwing up obstacles to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) plans to confirm a batch of executive and judicial branch nominees this weekend. Sen. Chuck Grassley (Iowa), the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, said if Reid wants to confirm 12 pending federal district judges, he will have to run them through the regular floor process, which could take days. Grassley noted that Republicans don’t have enough votes to block the judicial nominees but they can drag out the process, which may force Reid to bring the Senate in next week if he wants to get the...

Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, the presumptive chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, on Monday outlined his leadership plans—including his vow to confirm “consensus” nominations to the federal judiciary. Grassley, currently the committee’s ranking Republican, told his home state papers over the weekend that he intended to chair the Judiciary Committee. The committee, Grassley said Monday, “should not be a rubber stamp for the president” when it comes to nominations. Grassley said in his statement: Factors I consider important include intellectual ability, respect for the Constitution, fidelity to the law, personal integrity, appropriate judicial temperament, and professional competence. Judges are to...