The Russia hoax shadowed Trump's entire first term and nearly destroyed his presidency.
Grassley just released the FBI emails behind it – and one is almost too brazen to believe.
What Grassley found in those emails was enough to call it worse than Watergate.
FBI Agent Compared Musk DOGE Work to the Hillary Clinton Email Scandal
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley arrived at an oversight hearing with Kash Patel carrying something Democrats never wanted made public – not theories, but emails.
Grassley released a batch of newly unclassified FBI communications during the hearing, and one of them is so absurd it reads like political fiction.
Former FBI Special Agent Kevin Gounaud wrote an internal email proposing a criminal investigation of Elon Musk.
The basis for that investigation?
Musk – serving as a special government employee overseeing the Department of Government Efficiency – had posted on X asking federal workers to list five things they accomplished during the week.
That was the crime.
Gounaud argued in the email that because Musk made the announcement on a platform he owns, he had generated personal advertising revenue from an official government communication.
Then Gounaud reached for the comparison that should end any remaining sympathy for the FBI's Obama-era culture.
He wrote that Musk's use of X was "conceptually similar to Hillary Clinton's misuse of a private email server for government business."
An FBI agent compared asking bureaucrats to justify their jobs to one of the most infamous security scandals in modern political history.
Grassley made the email public and told the hearing the agent was prepared to open a CRIMINAL CASE – all because Musk asked federal workers to list five things they accomplished in a week.
Gounaud has since been fired.
https://twitter.com/washington_EY/status/2100258408913875420
Crossfire Hurricane Agent Emailed Seven Times to Join the Russia Hoax
Gounaud was not the only name in those newly released documents.
The second set of emails involves Walter Giardina – also recently fired – and they reveal something even darker than the Musk scheme.
Beginning in January 2017, Giardina sent at least seven emails in roughly four weeks begging to be assigned to Crossfire Hurricane, the FBI's investigation into whether Donald Trump's 2016 campaign had colluded with Russia.
Nobody recruited him. He begged his way in.
On the day of Trump's inauguration, Giardina emailed FBI agent Joe Pientka – already deep inside Crossfire Hurricane – to say: "I wanted to mention again my interest in joining the case."
While Americans were watching Trump take the oath of office, FBI agents were actively maneuvering to expand the operation targeting him.
Giardina also attempted to open a case against Senator Kyrsten Sinema after she left the Democrat Party – a detail that destroys the claim these were isolated incidents of individual bias.
The emails show Giardina coordinated with Timothy Thibault throughout this period.
Grassley had previously accused Thibault of violating the Hatch Act for partisan political conduct while serving as an FBI agent.
Taken together, these emails describe a network – and that network had institutional cover at the highest levels of FBI leadership.
Newly released documents show the Wray FBI intentionally misclassified records connected to Crossfire Hurricane to make oversight harder.
An email from FBI Supervisory Special Agent Michael DeLauro, a member of the now-disbanded Foreign Influence Task Force, explained the reasoning directly: "We apologize for the classification caveats, but our Office of General Counsel has directed us to classify our work this way based on past experience with Crossfire Hurricane."
They buried evidence of their own targeting operation behind classification stamps.
A separate batch of records shows the FBI tracked Peter Navarro's appearances on Fox News – logging his interviews with Sean Hannity as part of building a case against a Trump ally.
Grassley has been exposing this network for nearly a decade.
His work has already surfaced Operations Arctic Frost and Round River, prior FBI schemes aimed at Republicans that the mainstream press spent years dismissing as conspiracy theories.
"The previous Democrat administrations, under both Obama and Biden, conducted secret, insidious and downright evil operations that almost took down our government," Grassley told Patel during the hearing.
"That's arguably worse than Watergate."
Patel confirmed his FBI has now produced the largest Crossfire Hurricane document release to Congress in bureau history – and said more is coming.
Democrats on the committee spent the hearing attacking Patel over travel expenses.
After it ended, Patel went directly to Fox News's Hannity and unloaded on Senate Democrats, calling their performance an exercise in partisan buffoonery rather than oversight of the American people's law enforcement agency.
What the emails collectively reveal is an FBI culture where targeting political enemies was aspirational.
Agents lined up for the job. One begged seven times to join the operation against a sitting president. Another drafted a criminal referral over a management tweet.
Nobody had to give these men orders – and that is what separates this from ordinary government misconduct.
For the first time, an FBI director has both the document trail and a voter mandate to do something about it.
Whether it happened is no longer the debate – the emails settle that. The only question left is whether anyone is going to pay for it.
Sources:
- Chuck Grassley, "Grassley Opens Senate Judiciary FBI Oversight Hearing," U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, September 15, 2026.
- Chuck Grassley, "Grassley Questions Director Patel at Senate Judiciary Committee Oversight Hearing," U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary, September 15, 2026.
