Democrats planted false stories in effort to derail Biden investigations, Grassley says

One of the longest serving members of Congress in a scathing speech on Wednesday accused Democrats of resorting to dirty tricks in order to derail investigations into Joe and Hunter Biden’s dealings with Ukraine. "This is the behavior of cowards. And it has to stop," Sen. Chuck Grassley declared.

Democrats have accused two leading senators of engaging in disinformation, while in truth the accusers are engaging in disinformation, said Grassley, R-Iowa, in his speech to lawmakers. 

Citing investigations being led by himself and Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Grassley highlighted important revelations, among them that parts of the infamous anti-Trump document, the Steele Dossier, were based on Russian disinformation.  

The current investigations by Grassley and Johnson center on Hunter Biden’s position on the board of the Burisma company in Ukraine when his father, Joe Biden, was vice president.

Both Grassley and Johnson have come under fire from Congressional Democrats who have sought to discredit the investigation - thus prompting Grassley's floor speech.

“In the last few weeks, Democrats have falsely accused me and Senator Johnson of receiving packets of information, including tapes, from a Ukrainian,” Grassley said. “That’s false reporting based on leaks from a letter written by Senator Schumer, Senator Warner, Speaker Pelosi, and Representative Schiff, which is itself based on cherry picked innuendo from classified documents.”

In his forceful remarks, Grassley accused Democrats of acting in bad faith.

"This nonsense of orchestrated leaks to plant stories falsely accusing me of dealing in disinformation based on actual disinformation that I wasn’t even privy to serves only the interest of our shared adversaries," he said. "This is the behavior of cowards. And it has to stop."

Elsewhere, he countered the Democrats’ claims. 

“Let me be clear, my investigation with Senator Johnson is based on how the Obama administration formulated its Ukraine policy, which then Vice President Biden oversaw while his son was on the board of a corrupt Ukrainian natural gas company that was under investigation,” Grassley said.

Summarizing the Russia collusion investigation that produced no evidence of collusion between Moscow and Donald Trump, Grassley took a swipe at the Democrats for not examining the roots of those charges.

“Maybe the Democrats don’t want to look under the hood of the fake Russia investigation because they’d be front and center,” Grassley said.

The pointed floor statement follows an Aug. 4 letter from Grassley and Johnson to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Senate Intelligence Vice Chair Mark Warner (D-Va.), and House Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff (D-Calif.).

“The fact that the press knew more about the content of the allegedly classified material than we did indicates that you are more interested in grabbing headlines and scoring political points than actually addressing and confronting the issue of foreign interference in our elections,” Grassley and Johnson wrote in their letter.

“We have neither sought out, relied upon, nor publicly released anything that could even remotely be considered disinformation,” the two wrote.

Grassley, 86, was first elected in 1980, and is serving his seventh term in the United States Senate.