The FBI spent three years trying to destroy Donald Trump's presidency using a dossier Hillary Clinton's campaign bankrolled.
That same culture was still running in February 2025, two days after Kash Patel took the director's chair.
Grassley has the email from inside it, and the crime one agent thought Elon Musk committed will floor you.
FBI Agent Sought Criminal Investigation of Elon Musk Over DOGE Productivity Email
The Office of Personnel Management sent a productivity email to every federal worker in February 2025 at Elon Musk's direction during his work for DOGE.
The subject line: "What did you do last week?"
Employees were asked to list five accomplishments from the prior week.
That email – routine, the kind any halfway-engaged manager sends – sent then-Special Agent Kevin Gounaud reaching for his keyboard.
He wanted Musk prosecuted.
"I would like to recommend the opening of a criminal 58 matter on the person(s) at OPM who approved the transmission of the earlier email," Gounaud wrote to colleagues on February 22, 2025 – the same day the five-things directive landed, two days after Patel was confirmed as FBI director.
A "criminal 58 matter" is FBI shorthand for a formal criminal investigation.
Gounaud's legal theory: demanding that federal workers justify their taxpayer-funded salaries was a "colossal" waste of official time, a violation of information-security policy, and an act of self-enrichment because Musk promoted the email on X, the platform he owns.
He compared it to Hillary Clinton using a private email server for official government business.
A productivity email sent to government workers, in his telling, was legally indistinguishable from one of the worst misuses of classified government information in modern history.
"And no, I'm not kidding," he told colleagues.
Gounaud offered to write the case-opening paperwork himself and find a willing prosecutor.
There is no indication any investigation was ever opened.
He left the FBI approximately one year after writing the email.
His LinkedIn profile shows him working as a self-employed security consultant.
Grassley and Kash Patel Expose a Decade of FBI Weaponization
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley released the Gounaud email at FBI Director Kash Patel's second annual oversight hearing.
It was one of three sets of records Grassley unveiled at the session.
A second document showed FBI agents logging Peter Navarro's television appearances in 2022 during his contempt-of-Congress investigation – surveillance of a presidential adviser for doing cable news hits.
A third set of records tied into the bureau's broader pattern of deploying federal law enforcement resources against Trump allies while giving Democrats a pass.
Grassley did not arrive at the hearing surprised.
"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," Grassley said in his opening statement.
"And here we are, in 2026, still finding records from years ago showing even more evidence of targeting."
He added: "The overall sustained efforts by the Deep State in the dark corners of the bureaucracy is worse than anything Trump has been accused of."
That is not a line from a man who stumbled onto something.
Grassley has documented this pattern since Crossfire Hurricane – the FBI counterintelligence operation launched against Trump's 2016 campaign on the basis of a Democrat-funded dossier.
He tracked it through the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop investigation.
And through the targeting of January 6 defendants.
Now he has an email that shows the mentality persisting into the opening days of Trump's second term.
The Deep State Did Not Read the 2024 Election Results
Kevin Gounaud wrote his email on February 22, 2025.
Trump had been back in office for 33 days.
The American people had just delivered a decisive mandate to cut government waste and reduce the federal workforce. The era of unaccountable bureaucrats collecting paychecks without answering to anyone was supposed to be over.
Gounaud's answer to that mandate was a criminal referral against the man Trump put in charge of delivering it.
He was not a fringe actor operating alone.
This was a credentialed FBI special agent working through normal bureau channels, drafting a criminal case against a presidential adviser for a productivity email.
The FBI he worked in investigated Trump's 2016 campaign on the basis of opposition research Democrats paid for. It buried a laptop implicating a sitting vice president's son of crimes before a presidential election.
Kash Patel has spent two years cleaning that culture out.
He thought asking bureaucrats what they did all week was a federal crime. That is the FBI Kash Patel walked into.
Sources:
- Rusty Weiss, "'I'm Not Kidding': FBI Agent Tried to Prosecute Musk for Asking Gov't Workers What They Did All Week," RedState, September 15, 2026.
- "FBI Agent Wanted to Investigate Elon Musk for Asking Federal Employees What They Did That Week," Daily Caller, September 15, 2026.
- Cristina Laila, "FBI Agent Pushed to Criminally Investigate Elon Musk for Asking About Government Employees' Weekly Productivity," Gateway Pundit, September 15, 2026.
- Matt Vespa, "New Email From Disgraced FBI Agent Truly Shows the Rot of the Anti-Trump Deep State," Townhall, September 15, 2026.
- Sam J., "Catherine Herridge Drops DAMNING Receipts: Just GUESS Who Wanted Elon Musk Prosecuted Over DOGE," Twitchy, September 15, 2026.
