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snip: On January 4, Grassley and Sen. Lindsey Graham, chairman of the crime and terrorism subcommittee, sent a criminal referral to the FBI and Justice Department concerning Christopher Steele, the former British spy who authored the Trump dossier. In a cover letter, Grassley and Graham suggested that Steele might have lied to the FBI during his association with the bureau as he compiled the dossier. That's all the cover letter said. The referral itself, which was classified, made the actual case about Steele. Grassley wrote an unclassified version of the referral for public release — finally, the public could understand...

Wow. Massive amounts of confirmation for the ongoing strategy we outlined was underway. [Remember the batting order: Nunes, Grassley, Goodlatte, Horowitz] As expected Senator Chuck Grassley, Chairman of Senate Judiciary Committee, steps to the plate following Devin Nunes. We previously outlined how Senator Chuck Grassley was directly calling the bluff of the FBI when he sent a criminal referral to the justice department for Christopher Steele. Much of the referral itself was redacted and withheld from public view because it was classified. Today, in a move with strong parallels to Chairman Nunes (House Intel Committee Memo), Senator Grassley is asking...

WASHINGTON – U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, and Sen. Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, wrote a letter to the Justice Department Office of Inspector General Tuesday regarding the revelation that the FBI did not preserve text messages between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page for the time period between Dec. 14, 2016, and May 17, 2017. In a previous letter to Sens Johnson and Grassley, IG Michael Horowitz stated his office obtained text messages from Nov. 30, 2016, through July 28, 2017 without disclosing the missing texts. The Senators’ letter...

Hillary on FBI Investigation: 'I Can't Control What the Republicans and Their Allies Do' Katherine Timpf Hillary Clinton says she “not concerned” about the FBI investigation into her handling of highly classified material “because I know what the facts are.” Appearing this morning on Meet the Press, Clinton blamed Republicans for the latest reports her server contained material beyond top secret. “I never sent or received any material marked ‘classified,’ I cannot control what the Republicans leak and what they are contending,” Clinton said. She then echoed her campaign manager, Brian Fallon, who said the intelligence community’s inspector general is...

Judicial and LGBT advocates are slamming Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) for scheduling a vote on a horde of judicial nominees ahead of a possible government shutdown. The Senate Judiciary Committee is slated to vote Thursday on 17 judicial nominees, who were re-nominated by President Trump at the beginning of the month. Under Senate rules, nominees have to be approved by the full Senate in order to carry over into a new session of Congress. But advocates are accusing Grassley of trying to avoid public scrutiny by slipping controversial candidates opposed by Democrats into an already stacked agenda....

Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein (Calif.) on Thursday denied that she ever said she was "pressured" to release private testimony of Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson. Feinstein, who is the ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee, released the transcript without consulting Committee Chairman Sen. Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) and said Wednesday that she was "pressured" to do so. On Thursday, however, she said she was not pressured and denied ever having said that. "I made no statement to that effect," Feinstein said about being pressured. BuzzFeed reporter Emma Loop pressed the senator further, saying that there is a recording of...

The former British spy who compiled a dossier of allegations about Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia brought the document to the FBI in July 2016 because he was worried about “whether a political candidate was being blackmailed,” according to a congressional interview transcript released Tuesday. California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, revealed the transcript from an August closed-door interview with Glenn Simpson, a co-founder of the political opposition research firm Fusion GPS. The firm commissioned the dossier, which was initially paid for by a conservative website and then later by Democrats, including Hillary...

James Comey has been under more than his fair share of scrutiny lately, but now a new angle seems to be emerging. The Washington Times reported on Friday that former Justice Department lawyer Ty Clevenger has raised questions in New York over whether Comey’s decision to leak potentially classified memos to the press through a friend of his might constitute grounds for disbarment. And the original complaint is tied to accusations being made by Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley. Former FBI Director James Comey’s decision to leak memos of his interactions with President Trump could come back to haunt him in...

WASHINGTON — A Republican senator is demanding that the Trump administration and a university scrutinize how a researcher was able to inject an experimental herpes vaccine into human subjects without routine safety oversight. In letters sent out Thursday, Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley also told the administration and Southern Illinois University that he wanted to be reassured that “corrective action" was being taken to prevent similar research abuses. Southern Illinois University professor William Halford tested his experimental herpes vaccine on participants in the Caribbean and in U.S. hotel rooms without Food and Drug Administration or institutional review board oversight. After Halford...

Yup, the walls are closing in. In a brilliant move of strategery, Senate Judiciary Chairman, Chuck Grassley, and Senate Judiciary member, Lindsey Graham, send a criminal referral of Christopher Steele to the DOJ for investigation. But things are not what they seem… Today Senators Grassley and Graham sent a letter of criminal referral to the Department of Justice, based on information -provided by the FBI- their investigation has uncovered. However, the actual motive for the criminal referral is not exactly what it appears.

Two Republican senators have made the first known criminal referral in congressional investigations of Russian meddling in the 2016 election, targeting the author of a dossier of allegations about President Donald Trump’s ties to Russia. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham said Friday they had referred former British spy Christopher Steele to the Justice Department for investigation about false statements he may have made to the government. Graham is the chairman of a Judiciary subcommittee that is investigating the Russian meddling. The referral comes after Republicans in Congress have made several attempts in...

Mueller’s “Pit Bull” Andrew Weissmann under scrutiny as Rosenstein agrees to turn over documents to Nunes The Department of Justice has agreed to turn over all documents related to the controversial dossier to the House Intelligence Committee after four months of wrangling and legal threats ended in a Wednesday night phone call and agreement. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein spoke at length Wednesday night, just hours before Nunes’ imposed midnight deadline on the Justice Department passed. Rosenstein not only agreed to provide all the documents requested, which include unreacted FBI interviews with witnesses,...

Two top Republican senators have formally recommended that the Justice Department and FBI investigate the author of the controversial anti-Trump "dossier," in the first known criminal referral from Congress

Dear Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein: This Committee has previously written to the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation about the memoranda that former Director Comey created purportedly memorializing his interactions with President Trump.1 My staff has since reviewed these memoranda in a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) at the FBI, and I reviewed them in a SCIF at the Office of Senate Security. The FBI insisted that these reviews take place in a SCIF because the majority of the memos are classified. Of the seven memos, four are marked classified at the “SECRET” or “CONFIDENTIAL” levels. Only...

The most dangerous time for a rescue swimmer is the moment he reaches a desperate drowning man… Former FBI Director James Comey is sending out signals for anyone to back him up. He’s desperate. The sunlight is too intense now. Note the inherent elitist perspective he openly transmits toward being “independent”, or put another way: “above the law”. The mindset here is the same he carried while in office. That mindset claims the FBI is above scrutiny, a system of law unto itself, and we must blindly owe it respect. THAT is exactly the view that fertilizes the seeds of...

A top Republican senator said Wednesday that it appears former FBI Director James Comey leaked classified information in his effort to shape the narrative surrounding President Trump’s decision to fire him. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley said Mr. Comey wrote seven memos, and shared four of them with a professor he was using as an intermediary to defend him. Of the seven, four are marked at the confidential or secret level — meaning at least one of the memos Mr. Comey shared contained restricted information. Mr. Grassley now wants to know when and how the memos were deemed...

Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (Iowa-R) is pushing back on Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm that helped assemble the controversial "Steele dossier" about President Trump. The co-founders of Fusion GPS, Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, wrote a blistering op-ed for The New York Times on Tuesday slamming the GOP's investigations into the dossier. They accused Republicans of selectively leaking details of their testimony to the press and demanded that full transcripts be released. But Grassley, whose panel interviewed Simpson in August, in a statement Wednesday said Simpson has already been invited to testify publicly about the dossier, adding that...

en. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) reignited his feud with the History Channel on Saturday after apparently watching a history program on another channel. "Just watched history on An American Experience abt Thomas Edison the inventor Thx Comcast on Arlington Va Channel 19 DO U GET MESSAGE HISTORY CHANNEL???" the senator tweeted.

Top Republicans are stepping up their criticism of FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, even suggesting he should be ousted amid allegations conflicts of interest and anti-Trump political prejudice at the agency. “Andrew McCabe cuts across every facet of every investigation in 2016 that your viewers are interested in from Secretary [Hillary] Clinton’s emails to the investigation into the Trump campaign,” Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., a member of the House Judiciary Committee, told Fox News' "America's Newsroom" on Tuesday. A day earlier, Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley told reporters that McCabe should be fired. “And I’ve said that before and I’ve...

(snip) -- Just what did two FBI agents, both of whom ended up on Robert Mueller’s special counsel probe, mean by having an “insurance policy” against a Donald Trump victory? Mueller later removed Peter Strzok when the text messages emerged from their private communications, and Lisa Page had left the probe earlier on her own, but the claim appears to reference a plan in August 2016 to use the power of the FBI to attack a newly elected president. Politico reports that Senate Judiciary chair Chuck Grassley wants answers from Rod Rosenstein ASAP: (snip) --Question 5 is the big enchilada....