‘A lot of people fear he’s not the same old Chuck Grassley’: Where has the surveillance chief gone under Trump 2.0?

The Iowa Republican was not criticizing FBI Director Kash Patel or Attorney General Pam Bondi. In a July statement, he expressed anger at the FBI’s “extreme lack of effort” in its investigation into Democrat Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of state a decade ago.

Trump loyalists have shaken up the Justice Department, shattering norms and leading to a mass exodus of veteran officials, but the 92-year-old chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee has remained focused on the past.

Critics say Grassley’s reluctance to challenge the Trump administration has even extended to one defining issue: his support for whistleblowers who expose fraud, waste and abuse.

In an interview, Grassley insisted he had not abandoned his oversight role. He said he felt compelled to investigate problems under previous presidents to avoid a repeat of what he described as politically motivated prosecutions against Trump and his allies.

“Political militarization is surfacing and becoming more transparent because this administration is the most cooperative of all administrations – Republican or Democratic,” Grassley said.

Grassley acknowledged that Congress has ceded a lot of power to the current administration, a concession he said makes its own oversight more crucial.

“It’s going to increase the need for it,” he said.

Grassley is known for his emphasis on surveillance

Grassley, upon entering Congress in 1975, quickly developed a reputation for exposing corruption and waste. He once drove to the Pentagon in his orange Chevrolet Chevette to demand answers from officials about their purchase of hammers for $450 and coffee makers for $7,600.

He was a leading proponent in Congress of laws to protect employees who exposed such waste and sponsored the landmark 1989 Whistleblower Protection Act. He also played a key role in holding inspectors general, internal watchdog agencies tasked with rooting out misconduct, accountable.

“He has been the conscience of the Senate on whistleblower protections for decades,” said Tom Devine, legal director of the Government Accountability Project. In the current Congress, he has co-sponsored legislation strengthening protections for whistleblowers within the FBI and CIA.

“No one comes close to making his impact,” Devine said. “That doesn’t mean we always agree with his judgment on policy.”

Criticized for not attacking the Trump administration

Trump and Grassley are not always aligned. Last week, for example, they argued over the pace of confirmation of administration nominees.

Even so, Democrats and good-government advocates say Grassley remained conspicuously silent as the administration investigated Trump’s alleged enemies, fired agents who worked on politically sensitive cases and upended the Justice Department’s longstanding independence after Watergate.

Some whistleblowers have been reluctant to confide in him about revelations that could harm the administration, according to interviews with more than a dozen current and former U.S. officials, or their lawyers, several of whom spoke on condition of anonymity because they feared retaliation.

“A lot of people are concerned that he’s not the same old Chuck Grassley,” said Eric Woolson, author of a 1995 biography of Grassley and a former spokesman for Grassley’s campaign.

Grassley rejected that criticism, saying whistleblowers call him no matter who occupies the White House. His office’s online portal received more than 5,300 complaints in 2025, about the same number as in previous years, staffers reported.

“Throughout his career, he’s the man people will trust,” said Jason Foster, a former senior investigative adviser to Grassley who founded Empower Oversight, a group that advocated on behalf of disciplined FBI agents under the Biden administration.

A loyal ally of Trump

Many of Grassley’s recent actions, however, suggest he has gone from a fiercely independent moderate eager to detect fraud to a staunch Trump ally, according to Democrats and whistleblower advocates.

Some were particularly alarmed by Grassley’s dismissal of witnesses who raised concerns about the June nomination of Emil Bove, a senior Justice Department official and former Trump lawyer, to a lifetime seat on the federal appeals court.

Among several officials who came forward was Justice Department lawyer Erez Reuveni, who said he was fired for refusing to comply with Bove’s plans to defy court orders and hide information from judges to advance the administration’s aggressive deportation goals.

Grassley said his staff attempted to investigate some of the allegations, but a whistleblower’s attorneys allegedly did not provide his staff with all requested documents in time. Instead of delaying the hearing to dig deeper, Grassley circled the wagons behind Trump’s nominee.

The “vicious rhetoric, unfair accusations and abuse directed at Mr. Bove,” Grassley said in a speech, “crossed the line.”

Stacey Young, a former Justice Department lawyer who founded Justice Connection, a network of department alumni mobilized to defend the department’s traditionally apolitical staff, said she was disappointed that Grassley did not use her influence to condemn the firings within the department.

“How is the majority of Congress not crying bloody murder? We are seeing the near decimation of the DOJ in real time, and Congress is standing by and doing nothing,” she said. “Does Senator Grassley think it’s okay for people to be fired for doing their jobs? »

At an oversight hearing in September, Grassley passed up the opportunity to question Patel about a series of firings of high-level line officers and supervisors, including five whose abrupt and still unexplained dismissals had made headlines weeks earlier.

When Democrats insisted that Patel was using the office plane for personal reasons, Grassley chastised his Senate colleagues for their disinterest in the former directors’ travel practices.

Grassley has also been a willing conduit for FBI leaders seeking to expose what they insist was misconduct and overreach amid a Biden administration investigation into Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

He released batches of sensitive documents from that investigation, known as “Arctic Frost,” that he said were provided by FBI whistleblowers or that were labeled as “Produced by FBI Director Kash Patel.” The records are not the type of documents that federal law enforcement would typically make public themselves.

Defenders dismayed by Grassley’s response to IG firings

Whistleblower advocates said they were dismayed when Grassley failed to take a strong stance when Trump, days after taking office, fired some inspectors general without cause.

Even some Republican-appointed inspectors general have accused Trump of violating a law requiring the White House to provide 30 days’ notice and justification to Congress. If a Republican were to defend them, some of the fired inspectors general said, they expected it to be Grassley.

“He has been unusually quiet,” said Mark Greenblatt, a Trump appointee to the Interior Department who was among those fired. “It is unimaginable that the Grassley of a few years ago, the man who detained candidates and issued blistering threats at the slightest provocation to protect inspectors general, would be so silent in the face of these attacks.”

Grassley responded to the purge by sending Trump a letter asking officials to “immediately” clarify the specific reasons for their firings, on a case-by-case basis.

It took eight months for the White House to respond. In a two-page letter, he reaffirmed presidential authority to fire inspectors general at will and attempted to explain his rationale only by invoking “changed priorities.”

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Associated Press writer Ryan J. Foley in Iowa City, Iowa, contributed to this report.