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Floor Speech

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Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, once again, I am going to remind people that there was some wrong done by the U.S. Government between the periods of about 6 years ago to 10 years ago, and the taxpayers of this country might wonder why a Senator is bringing this stuff up. It involves government coverup. The public's business always ought to be public, and if there is government coverup, we need to make sure that the public knows about it and people in government know about it that might be wanting to cover up things today so they learn a lesson that I hope I can say that nobody is going to get away with wrongdoing if they are working for the U.S. Government.

So here I go on something that most people would consider history but has got a present-day purpose for doing. As part of my longstanding oversight of the FBI's discredited, ``Crossfire Hurricane'' investigation into President Trump, this week I made public a formerly classified document. Probably most of it shouldn't have been classified in the first place. That is the way the government does things to cover up.

The American people deserve to see the facts that the FBI previously buried. This document, known as the Durham Annex, contains intelligence suggesting Hillary Clinton's campaign fabricated the Trump-Russia narrative in 2016. But the FBI turned a blind eye to the evidence. In other words, it was used as a political weapon.

The American people deserve full transparency about the FBI's failure to investigate this intelligence and related records so that America's law enforcement Agencies and intelligence communities aren't weaponized again.

I am grateful to Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel for working with me to totally bring this information to light, and it is just not those two people that President Trump has appointed but other people like Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence, have done in other ways things that were buried by previous administrations that she is making public knowledge of. And I could say, very generally, that the Trump administration is better than any Republican or Democratic administration in the past of trying to get some of this wrongdoing out and declassifying stuff that shouldn't have been classified in the first place.

Now, what I have just told you is not the end of the story. There is a lot more to uncover, and you can expect more documents to be released from this Senator in the coming months. This is not a Republican issue, this is not a Democrat issue, this is an issue of the bureaucracy, in this case the FBI being used as a political weapon, covering up. In fact, some of these documents that I released, Director Patel told me, and I think he also told the public this, that they found some of this evidence in what the FBI would call a burn bag.

So we have got to make sure that this stuff doesn't happen again.

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