Hawkeye Reporter

Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, appeared on Newsmax’s “The Record with Greta van Susteren” to discuss his role in declassifying and releasing the previously classified appendix, known as the Durham annex, from Special Counsel John Durham’s 2023 report.

The released annex outlines a reported plan by Hillary Clinton’s campaign to falsely link then-candidate Donald Trump to Russia. It also details the FBI’s lack of a thorough investigation into these allegations.

Grassley stated, “There was a terrible conspiracy way back then, maybe as early as 2015, by the [Democratic National Committee], the [George] Soros group and the [Hillary] Clinton campaign to have this narrative that Trump should not be elected.” He continued, “We’re trying to have full transparency of things that we suspected for the last eight to 10 years... It seems to me this Durham annex investigation that we’ve released today fills in all the information that we need to know. This was a conspiracy to destroy Trump and elect Clinton. Another thing it shows is that the FBI was in on the cover up of it.”

Addressing how evidence was handled during investigations, Grassley said, “The cover up was so bad… that some of these documents, emails and thumb drives were in trash bags, or what you call ‘burn bags.’ That’s where the FBI found them. So doesn’t that tell you something about the deep state here in this city of Washington – an island surrounded by reality – that they’d do anything to cover up and [avoid] embarrassment?”

He added, “It proves the weaponization of the FBI to destroy political enemies, and that’s what we’ve got to stop. As you’ve heard me say so many times, transparency brings accountability.”

On calls for justice following these revelations, Grassley remarked: “You have people like [former Central Intelligence Agency Director John] Brennan writing for the New York Times yesterday to cover their fanny, because they may be guilty of something. So I think a lot of people in this town are scared, and they ought to be scared.”

“Taking care of them will make sure these things don’t happen again. Otherwise, there’s no sense [in] Chuck Grassley working for years to get this information out if it’s business as usual. I don’t want it to be business as usual. I want things in this town – an island surrounded by reality – to change,” he said.

Grassley credited members of former President Trump’s administration for supporting transparency efforts: “We were able to get [the Durham annex] because of the hard work of [Attorney General] Pam Bondi and Director [Kash] Patel of the FBI, and the whole atmosphere of the second Trump administration for greater transparency and cooperating with congressional oversight.”

He concluded by contrasting previous administrations’ cooperation with Congress: “I’m doing the job of congressional oversight, but I could never – under Republican or Democrat administrations – get the cooperation that I’m getting out of the Trump administration.”