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Floor Speech

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Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, soon the Senate will proceed to a final vote on the nomination of Emil Bove; that is to be judge on the Third Circuit.

As I said in my statement in the Judiciary Committee multiple times, I support the nomination of Mr. Bove. He has a strong legal background and has served his country honorably.

I believe he will be diligent, capable, and a fair jurist. My Republican colleagues on the Senate Judiciary Committee agree, and that is why he was reported out of committee with every Republican supporting his nomination.

It is no surprise to anyone who follows this nomination that I have serious concerns with how my Democratic colleagues have conducted themselves.

The vicious rhetoric, unfair accusations, and abuse directed at Mr. Bove by some on this committee have crossed the line.

I wish I could say that this posture has been limited to just this nomination, but unfortunately it appears to be a pattern. Since the very beginning of this Congress, Democrats have engaged in obstruction campaigns for nearly every one of President Trump's nominees.

Their playbook has included maximum procedural obstruction, unfair media attacks, repeated attempts to allege misconduct, and demands for delayed consideration, records, and investigations. This Congress alone, Democrats have sent at least 26 letters to 17 agencies or parties demanding records, delays, or investigations into President Trump's nominees, just in the Judiciary Committee. Like clockwork, just before a hearing or a vote, we get another breathless accusation that one of President Trump's nominees needs to be--you guessed it-- investigated. I am afraid that what we have seen recently on the Bove nomination has been more of the same.

My Democratic colleagues have tried to weaponize my respect for whistleblowers and the whole whistleblowing process against me and, in turn, against Mr. Bove. Now I am here to set the record straight.

I take whistleblower complaints very seriously. During both Republican and Democratic administrations, I have spent over four decades defending patriotic whistleblowers. My conduct in defending whistleblowers and running bipartisan investigations stands in stark contrast to the conduct of my Democratic colleagues.

During the first Trump administration, I defended the Ukraine whistleblower's use of the whistleblower process even despite serious concerns about the substance of his complaint. When I was last chairman, I interviewed Donald Trump, Jr., and other Republicans as part of my bipartisan investigation into the alleged Russian collusion, and that was conducted through the Senate Judiciary Committee.

But when it came to the Biden family and the Biden administration, despite serious allegations and overwhelming evidence of misconduct, Democrats made no effort to investigate or conduct similar interviews like I did during a Republican administration. In fact, they worked hard to thwart any attempt at oversight. Now, these weren't fringe claims; they involved potential crimes squarely within the Judiciary Committee jurisdiction.

The Trump administration has said that Mr. Reuveni isn't a whistleblower. Now, I publicly disagreed with the position of the Trump administration. Now, that happens to be the opposite posture that my Democratic colleagues took with the IRS whistleblowers who blew the whistle on the Biden administration. My Democratic colleagues tried to destroy those whistleblowers and use the press to falsely claim that they were not, in fact, whistleblowers.

No one can say that I don't take whistleblower complaints seriously or that I don't investigate allegations in good faith. I have always said my door is open to whistleblowers, and my efforts regarding the Bove nomination show that this is true.

Mr. Reuveni made allegations against Mr. Bove--can you believe this?--just the morning before the nomination hearing. The allegations broke in a New York Times story, and the paper, as you would expect, gleefully ran the unvetted accusations without so much as giving the Justice Department or even the nominee the opportunity to respond.

At our Bove hearing in the Judiciary Committee, the Deputy Attorney General flatly denied the allegations in public statements, and the nominee denied them under oath both in the hearing and in response to written questions from members of the Judiciary Committee.

Then my Democratic colleagues received yet additional records from the whistleblower on July 1 and July 7 but hid them from Republicans. I didn't receive these accusations and records until July 10. Now--can you believe it?--that is the very same day that Mr. Bove's nomination was scheduled for its first markup.

The coordinated media strategy--let me repeat that. That is so important--how the media works in line with what the Democrats want to accomplish on this nomination. The coordinated media strategy involved a New York Times exclusive about the files and a Democratic press release containing a misleading summary of the documents. Why? All designed to smear Mr. Bove.

This timeline raises serious concerns, and it is legitimate to raise them as a major problem.

If my Democratic colleagues wanted to investigate allegations, they should have come to this Senator, and we could have vetted the allegations in good faith together. They didn't want this; they wanted to run a one-sided media campaign.

Regardless, I still did my job and investigated. My staff reviewed the disclosure document by document and analyzed the facts. The result: Almost none of the material referenced Mr. Bove at all. More concerningly, the Democrats' summary grossly mischaracterized the documents that it purported to summarize. In short, the documents didn't say what the Democrats say the documents said.

My staff also interviewed multiple people who were present for the March 14 meeting described in the whistleblower disclosure. Four separate people other than Mr. Bove who were present at the meeting told us the following: First, there was never any directive to ignore a court order, and secondly, each of them left the meeting with the understanding that the Justice Department would aggressively litigate but would follow court orders.

My staff then spoke to numerous other individuals, including many current and former Justice Department employees who wanted to share information about the Bove nomination. All told, my staff interviewed or spoke with more than a dozen individuals who came forward to discuss the Bove nomination.

With respect to the initial whistleblower allegations, even if you accept most of the claims as true, there is still no scandal. Government lawyers aggressively litigating and interpreting court orders isn't misconduct; that is common sense. That is not misconduct because that is what lawyers always do.

Concerningly, the minority repeatedly recast discussion of litigation strategy as wrongdoing, even discussions that reflected the government's official litigation positions, some positions which prevailed on appeal.

Now, pay attention to what--the whistleblower alleged misconduct, but 10 days after the key event he describes, he signed a brief stating, without qualification, that ``the government has complied with the Court's orders in this case.'' Now, this is the very same person that you have been reading about in the media that said that Bove was telling everybody not to follow court orders. Ten days after the key event he described, that person said this:

The government has complied with the Court's orders in this case.

If he believed the Department defied court orders, why sign a brief as an officer of the court saying that it had complied?

During the hearing, Mr. Bove firmly denied the allegations. He testified under oath:

I did not advise any Justice Department attorney to violate court orders.

Recent public reporting backs his account. Months before the whistleblower came forward, his former supervisor wrote in a letter to Mr. Bove:

[A]dvised our team that we must avoid a court order halting an upcoming operation to implement the Act at all costs.

This statement confirms Mr. Bove advised his team to avoid triggering a court order, not defy a court order, and that is consistent with Bove's testimony before the committee.

Now, everything I gave you up to now was the initial allegation, but now, on the very eve of Mr. Bove's final vote here in the U.S. Senate, the Democrats and their media allies have launched yet another salvo against Mr. Bove. On Friday--in other words, 3 days ago, maybe 4 days ago; you count it--we learned from social media that two other whistleblowers allegedly have derogatory information about Mr. Bove. One whistleblower said that they have filed a complaint with the inspector general. My staff requested the complaint and to speak with the whistleblower. Their requests were denied.

Another group, a group called Justice Connection, publicly alleged that a whistleblower has evidence that Bove wasn't truthful in his hearings and that ``the whistleblower has tried to share [this] info[rmation] with Republican Senators for weeks and they [haven't responded].''

To the extent that anyone is suggesting that this Senator Grassley hasn't been willing to receive and consider relative evidence, everybody that knows me would know that is just plain false.

I am the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and I represent Republicans on this committee. Regarding this whistleblower, my office was not proactively approached.

Indeed, since we saw these news reports on Friday, my staff proactively and repeatedly reached out to whistleblower lawyers asking to see the evidence that they apparently had already shared with multiple Democrats and also with the media.

My staff assured them that we would review the evidence in good faith. But now, here, all weekend--I want to repeat, all weekend--my staff was stonewalled and given the runaround. Any assertion that I or my staff was uninterested in the evidence is entirely false.

It wasn't until Monday morning--so you got Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday morning--that my staff received any information. Even then, it was bits and pieces of information created by lawyers, not original information.

My staff tried over and over to get all the information, only to be rejected. My staff was not shown the underlying transcript of the meeting until this morning. They were shown what was represented to be verbatim transcript of a meeting, but we still didn't have access to the underlying source.

So what did I do? I followed my usual process. I asked Mr. Bove to respond to the allegations that his testimony was inconsistent with the evidence that we saw for the first time Monday.

And he sent me a letter doing just that. I plan to make that letter public.

I have also asked permission to make this transcript public as well, but I don't know whether the lawyer will give me that permission.

In his letter, Mr. Bove flatly denies the allegations that he misled the committee. He explained that he testified truthfully in response to ``compound yes or no questions that sought to attribute words to me that I did not use during the February 14, 2025, video meeting.''

He also responds to the attacks on his character and rejects the allegations against him.

Viewed in light of the transcript, Bove's responses to compound hostile questions about specific words used in a meeting that happened months before his hearing do not, to me, indicate deliberately false and misleading testimony.

And, more importantly, the substance of the meeting itself does not reflect misconduct. It reflected a sympathetic tone during a turbulent time and appropriately characterizes the role of a Justice Department attorney.

In the meeting, Mr. Bove specifically acknowledged that being a Justice Department attorney means ``following orders from the President or [from] the Attorney General, unless we view them as unlawful or unethical.''

He apologized to the attorneys present for tension and told them:

I don't want to put pressure on you.

I am also curious at my Democrat colleagues' newfound interest in candor to the committee. During the Biden administration, Kristen Clarke unequivocally perjured herself before the Judiciary Committee in response to written questions.

When the information came to light after her confirmation, Democrats do what Democrats do: They closed ranks and refused to join Republicans in their call to hold her accountable.

Democrats likewise expressed no interest in evaluating the misleading and inconsistent testimony from numerous other Biden appointees.

When this committee considered the nomination of Justice Kavanaugh-- now on the Supreme Court--I criticized the tactics that Democrats employed, and I said this:

The Ranking Member sat on these allegations for nearly seven weeks, only to reveal them at the eleventh hour when it appeared that Judge Kavanaugh was headed toward nomination.

Now getting back to the Bove nomination, with respect to it, as with other nominees this Congress, Democrats appeared to have dusted off the playbook that they devised against Justice Kavanaugh.

They hid allegedly relevant information until a politically opportune time and then used it as an ambush to hurt the nominee. As I said about the Democrats' conduct during director--FBI Director Patel's nomination:

This is becoming a pattern, and I will not facilitate a campaign to undermine the results of the election by delaying consideration of nominees.

If anyone, including my colleagues, has information regarding a nominee--any nominee--that they believe is relevant to their fitness for office, I expect them to share it with me in a timely and candid manner so that the allegations can be fairly vetted, as opposed to what I have just told you: that we got most of this information from the Democrats that the whistleblowers were--the Democrats were peddling the whistleblowers' accusations the morning before the hearing, the morning before we were considering the nomination.

Everybody should know that my door is always open to whistleblowers. And while I may not always agree with someone else's conclusions, I will always fairly consider any information brought to my office.

My message to the three whistleblowers in this case is this: Just because I may disagree with the conclusions in a whistleblower disclosure, it doesn't mean that I don't support whistleblowers' rights to come forward. Whether I agree or disagree with whistleblowers, I will defend whistleblowers' rights.

Reasonable minds can differ, and when I direct my staff to allocate resources away from other ongoing whistleblower projects to handle situations like Bove, their efforts ought to be respected and given good faith treatment.

But contrary to what happened, this eleventh-hour media smear by my colleagues based on information that was hidden from the committee, these are all unacceptable, and I won't stand for it as a delay or obstruction tactic. This tactic didn't work against Justice Kavanaugh, and it won't work against Mr. Bove.

Mr. President, I look forward to supporting Mr. Bove and urge all of my colleagues to do the same.

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