Senate Judiciary chairman backs FBI leadership, presses oversight and records transparency

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Senate backs FBI oversight

Highlights

Senate Judiciary data show FBI total criminal arrests up 80%, violent crime arrests up 90%, and child victim identifications up 21% versus the prior 18 months.
Grassley releases new emails from the Crossfire Hurricane sub-case, asserting these support allegations of political targeting against President Trump and urging declassification for public review.
Grassley scrutinizes records handling and classification in Operation Round River, supports closing the task force, and confirms public release of records on Peter Navarro's arrest and FBI media monitoring.

Oversight hearing focuses on FBI performance

As reported by Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Grassley tells Patel at the committee's annual oversight hearing that the bureau posts stronger enforcement results in the past 18 months despite expected criticism over staffing and management changes.

Grassley says data provided to the committee show total criminal arrests are up 80%, violent crime arrests are up 90%, and gang and criminal enterprise arrests are up 30% compared with the preceding 18 months. He adds that the FBI helps locate and identify more than 11,000 children who were victims of crime, up 21%, and is involved in the arrest of more than 5,000 child predators and human traffickers, up 13%. He also says nine of the FBI's Top 10 fugitives are captured during Patel's tenure.

Grassley encourages Patel to protect what he calls legitimate whistleblowers and says congressional records releases rely heavily on their disclosures. He says the committee is beginning to receive records it has sought for a long time and argues that direct engagement with whistleblowers can give FBI leadership a clearer view of internal problems.

Political investigations and records handling remain under scrutiny

Grassley says he is making public additional emails linked to a Crossfire Hurricane sub-case and points to a December 2019 email to agent Joe Pientka that he says appears to support claims that President Trump was politically targeted. He says the material should be declassified so the public can draw its own conclusions.

He also highlights records involving former FBI officials including Timothy Thibault, Brian Giardina and Kevin Gounaud, alleging repeated efforts to join or open Trump-related matters. Grassley says emails show Giardina asked at least seven times in about four weeks to place himself on the Crossfire team, which he argues undercuts prior public claims that agents do not choose their own cases.

Grassley further revisits Operation Round River, a Foreign Influence Task Force effort he has questioned since July 2022 based on whistleblower disclosures. He says records suggest classification practices and redactions may have hindered congressional access, raises concerns about federal records retention, and backs Patel's decision to shut down the task force. He also says newly obtained records on Peter Navarro's arrest and media monitoring are being released in the name of transparency.

Our earlier report covered Senator Elizabeth Warren’s expanding scrutiny of whether staffing reductions are undermining core U.S. banking oversight systems. It detailed her inquiry into an alleged multiday outage at the Federal Reserve’s National Information Center and her questions about whether a reduced supervision workforce at the Fed and other regulators could weaken oversight of banks and their third-party technology vendors, including AI-related providers.

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