Prepared Opening Statement by Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa
Chairman, Senate Judiciary Committee
Unfit to Serve: How the Biden Cover-Up Endangered America and Undermined the Constitution
Wednesday, June 18, 2025
Good morning. I’d like to welcome everyone to the Judiciary Committee’s hearing.
We have multiple member statements today. So, without objection, I’ll introduce my longer statement into the hearing record.
Today’s hearing is about competency, corruption and cover-up within the Biden administration.
Simply put, the last administration was rudderless.
From one crisis to another, the Biden administration failed and faltered.
The partisan media did their best to cover-up those failures, but that can only be done for so long.
Having discussed these issues with my colleagues, Senators Cornyn and Schmitt, who requested to lead this hearing, all of us agreed that this committee must discuss these important matters.
An important part of this discussion involves the last administration’s corrupt weaponization of law enforcement against Trump and his associates, which was done to try and win an election.
That, too, they tried to cover-up.
Since I became chairman of this committee, my investigative work has exposed how that weaponization was done.
Look at the FBI’s Arctic Frost investigation, which ultimately became one of Jack Smith’s cases against President Trump.
Based on government records I’ve made public, the case’s origin was anti-Trump FBI agent Thibault and his merry band of partisans.
The records indicate that the opening of Arctic Frost was an intentionally designed vehicle by which the Biden administration would ultimately prosecute their primary political opponent: President Trump.
Then, I made emails public relating to the Biden administration’s political investigation into Peter Navarro.
Thibault and his other anti-Trump agent, Walter Giardina, were also involved in this case.
Whistleblowers have told me that Special Agent Giardina openly stated his desire to investigate Trump, even if it meant false predication.
Whistleblowers have also told me that Jack Smith’s deputy, J.P. Cooney, wanted to open more cases on Trump.
He allegedly justified using compulsory process to obtain more information merely based on partisan news outlets.
And guess who was also allegedly involved in those communications?
Special Agent Walter Giardina.
All of this is more evidence of law enforcement weaponization that would’ve never seen the light of day but for whistleblowers.
I’ll have more to say about this matter later today.
Then we have the Biden FBI’s anti-Catholic Richmond memo.
That memo used the shoddy research of the radical Southern Poverty Law Center to accuse traditional Catholics of being violent extremists.
Based on records I released the other week, there wasn’t just one FBI document that used biased anti-Catholic sources, but over a dozen.
And more FBI field offices were involved than we’d been led to believe.
It wasn’t just the Biden and Wray FBI that failed the people.
Recently, I released records showing that the Biden Health and Human Services also failed to address a backlog of over 65,000 reports expressing concern for unaccompanied children.
This included 7,346 reports related to trafficking.
Three dozen cases have been accepted by U.S. Attorneys for prosecution, with 11 arrests and three convictions so far.
The Biden administration had a responsibility to do right by the American people.
By any metric, they failed.
The question is what did the president actually know or even understand, and who was actually running the government?
But regardless, the buck stops with the president, and President Biden will have to answer to history for what happened the last four years.
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