Des Moines Sun

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) appeared on Newsmax’s “The Record with Greta van Susteren” to discuss his recent efforts to declassify and release the previously classified appendix, known as the Durham annex, from John Durham’s 2023 Special Counsel report.

The annex outlines an alleged plan by the Hillary Clinton campaign to falsely link then-candidate Donald Trump to Russia. It also describes what is characterized as a failure by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to fully investigate these claims.

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.”

Grassley criticized how some evidence related to the investigation was handled by federal authorities. “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 further action following these revelations, Grassley said, “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.”

Grassley credited officials from former President Donald Trump’s administration for enabling access to these documents: “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.

“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.”