Chuck Grassley needs to get his oversight focus back 

There was a time when Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) was a heavyweight in congressional oversight circles. His defense reform campaign during the Reagan administration was legendary. He led an effort to halt the unprecedented Reagan defense budget buildup in the 1980s, and left a trail of legislative structural reforms to ensure that the fight against defense fraud and waste would continue. In the 1990s, he led a congressional effort to clean up the FBI crime lab scandal. Other efforts populate his resume of reform achievements, including overhauling the IRS, the nursing home industry and how the Defense Department managed the Vietnam-era POW/MIA mission.  He got real, practical, long-term results. 

Grassley’s high-profile investigations largely centered around information provided by insiders and whistleblowers. There was also an oversight playbook — the do’s and don’ts — handed down to his staff by Watergate-era investigators and others who were steeped in the art and practice of successful congressional oversight. We followed those rules without deviation. 

All of that is a distant memory. Today, forty-some years later, there’s a new Chuck Grassley. He’s still the undisputed champion of whistleblowers, always fighting for legislative protections and supporting individual cases. He has earned the trust of whistleblowers, who have not stopped coming to him.   

Recently, however, fellow travelers in oversight circles have asked me: What has happened to Grassley?  Why has he become so unrecognizably political in his oversight?   

Unlike past oversight campaigns he led that fixed substantive bureaucratic dysfunction, today’s Grassley is indeed waging political battles. Gone are the days when he would launch empirical-laden assaults on misbehaving agencies to fix their broken-down cultures and structures. Now, his dragons are Hillary Clinton, the “Deep State,” Hunter Biden, and Joe Biden. He is closely associating with MAGA elements in Congress, like Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and James Comer (R-Ky.) who struggle mightily with the concept of credibility.

He also appears to be wading in the bogs with provocateurs and witnesses who so far seem to be credibility-challenged. His biggest grievance is that he can’t get information. Yet, that doesn’t seem to curb the allegations. 

Gone, also, are the guardrails handed down by the oversight professionals we would consult with for up to hours each day. Their Rule No. 1 was: Check politics at the door. Score political points by doing the right thing. Pursue good government and the political benefits will follow. He used to follow that religiously.

An instructive example of keeping politics at bay in oversight is the Jan. 6 select committee investigation. While the committee was run by Democrats, their witnesses were almost exclusively Donald Trump Republicans. That investigation was a home run. 

Grassley seems to have erected his own version of guardrails: If Democrats investigate Donald Trump, he has said, then by golly it’s only fair that we investigate Hillary Clinton, or Joe Biden as well. It’s the Fox News rule — “fair and balanced.”  Never mind if there’s a credible predicate for doing so.  

As a whistleblower magnet, Grassley finds himself in the middle of an apocalyptic struggle against the mythical Deep State. His first Armageddon was with Hillary and Uranium One. Few even remember that spectacular loser. His second was with the Deep State. His Heracles in that battle was special counsel John Durham who rounded up all the bad-acting deep-staters he could find — two. They were both embarrassingly acquitted unanimously by juries. Another spectacular supernova. 

Undaunted, Grassley has seemingly now marshaled a collection of whistleblowers he trusts enough to go out on a limb for, for the remaining two dragons. I say out on a limb because he is throwing around allegations as if he has irrefutable evidence. His reputation and credibility are at stake. For Hunter, he’s relying on some federal investigators with the IRS, perhaps others, who are claiming political interference in the Justice Department’s four-year-old case against the first son for tax and other issues. Perhaps he’ll be proven correct in the end. It’s a risk the oversight playbook always taught to avoid, lest you look really foolish if you’re wrong and diminish your credibility. 

Even more risky is Grassley’s dalliance with an FBI FD-1023 document as his point of departure against the president. It’s a document of unverified information identified by a whistleblower as being teeming with specificity about a bribery allegation against Joe Biden while vice president — probably at least as much specificity as the Steele Dossier, which contained alleged political dirt against then-candidate Trump, and which Grassley railed against for months as lacking credibility. He was proven correct about that in the end.  In a curious twist of fate for Grassley, could this document be another dubious Steele-type dossier?  Already, the document’s contents are being credibly challenged. 

One of the IRS whistleblowers has petitioned the Senate Finance Committee to investigate political interference and retaliation in the Hunter Biden case.  A recent story by Fox News quotes a Grassley spokesman as wondering why his boss has been cut out of the committee’s investigation. After all, the spokesman says, Grassley is a member of the committee and he’s co-chair of the Whistleblower Protection Caucus, “so there’s no legitimate reason to exclude Grassley’s staff from participating in this investigation.” I would also add that the non-profit — Empower Oversight — assisting the whistleblower is staffed with former Grassley investigators.

Given Grassley’s recent oversight track-record, I could suggest a few legitimate reasons to the Grassley spokesman as to why the committee chairman, Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), would want to keep Grassley at arm’s-length from this investigation. And I’d give my old boss a gratuitous suggestion: As ranking member on the Senate Budget Committee, he might consider dialing it back a few decades and re-visit history. Like then, the debt and deficits are today out of control, and given recent news, the old defense industrial complex dragon is rearing its menacing head again. Perhaps it’s time to re-focus the old Grassley oversight machine, and get some real, practical, long-term results once again.

Kris Kolesnik is a 34-year veteran of federal government oversight. He spent 19 years as senior counselor and director of investigations for Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa). Kolesnik then became executive director of the National Whistleblower Center. Finally, he spent 10 years working with the Department of the Interior’s Office of Inspector General as the associate inspector general for external affairs.