CENTRAL CITY, Iowa — Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) told a gathering of Republican voters on Sunday that he plans to pursue inquiries into Hunter Biden and pressure the FBI to root out political bias in its ranks.
“I want you to know that I’m not going to give up on the Hunter Biden investigation,” Grassley said, referring to President Joe Biden’s son. “Every one of you in this room, and everybody that isn’t in this room, ought to have extraordinary confidence in the FBI. But today, we can’t have it.”
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The remarks were part of a roughly 15-minute speech Grassley, 88, delivered near Cedar Rapids as he campaigned for an eighth Senate term, offering a window into the congressional investigations Republicans plan to pursue if they win majorities in Congress this fall. Grassley has a long history of using his Senate perch to investigate accusations of government malfeasance and corruption in the executive branch.
Grassley covered a range of topics from the podium of an annual summer political gathering organized by Rep. Ashley Hinson (R-IA). But his comments on Hunter Biden and the comparisons the senator drew with how the FBI is handling investigations into former President Donald Trump sparked raucous applause from the crowd.
Trump is the subject of a Justice Department investigation into his handling and possession of classified documents since leaving the White House. Earlier this month, the FBI executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s residence and private social club in Palm Beach, Florida, as a part of that inquiry. Grassroots Republicans were outraged, and some GOP lawmakers, including Grassley, have questioned the move.
“I want you to know, I’m not going to give up exposing political bias in the FBI,” the senator told the 500-plus Republican voters assembled at the Linn County Fairgrounds to support Hinson and hear from Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds, members of the party’s Iowa congressional delegation, and headliner Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC).
“It’s not the FBI agents at the grassroots of Iowa,” Grassley continued. “It’s the people at central headquarters. We’ve got to have [FBI] director [Christopher] Wray show us a concrete plan of how he’s going to get the political bias out of the FBI.” Wray was appointed by Trump after he fired the former director, James Comey, in 2017.
The full scope of this latest investigation into Trump is not known, and some congressional Republicans have held off on accusing the FBI of a politically motivated investigation pending more information.
But Trump charges the inquiry is an extension of a Democratic-driven effort to oust him from office, and politics altogether, beginning with the Russia investigation and two impeachment inquiries. That has motivated some Republicans to declare the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago wholly illegitimate and vow to use the powers available to the majority party in Congress to uncover the plot behind it, should they win House and Senate control in November.
Simultaneously, Republicans are raising questions about the delicate way the FBI is handling an investigation into Hunter Biden that is partly related to information discovered on his personal laptop computer that federal authorities obtained during the 2020 presidential campaign.
“This is a continuation of what’s been going on since 2016,” Grassley said, “with Russia-gate, with the Steele dossier, with the … FISA investigations, so they could snoop on the Trump campaign in 2016. And all of the emails of [Hillary] Clinton that she destroyed, never [accounted] for, and all of the other things that are going on — this political bias.”
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Nonpartisan political handicappers have recently downgraded the number of seats the GOP is projected to win in the midterm elections. However, Republicans do not need a red wave to win majorities — just five seats in the House and one seat, net, in the 50-50 Senate, where Democrats run committees and the floor, thanks to Vice President Kamala Harris’s tiebreaking vote.
Grassley, running against Democrat Mike Franken, is favored to win reelection in Iowa.
