New emails released by Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley provide further evidence that federal law enforcement and the Justice Department often had a wash, rinse and repeat mindset when it came to investigating President Donald Trump and his political allies. 

One of those emails, which Grassley released during a committee hearing with FBI Director Kash Patel, shows that one agent sought to open a criminal investigation into tech titan Elon Musk while he led efficiency efforts in the Trump administration last year as a special government employee. 

According to the agent’s theory, Musk’s effort to get government employees to share their weekly accomplishments in an email “encouraged, abetted, aided, etc. thousands if not tens of thousands of government employees to violate government wide security policy and transmit sensitive government information.”  

“And no, I’m not kidding,” the now-former FBI agent Kevin Gounaud wrote in the February 2025 email.

Grassley said the new emails he released Tuesday are part of a decade-long pattern of law enforcement and intelligence officials pursuing Trump and his closest allies. 

“For almost a decade now, I’ve made records public showing how a number of now discredited law enforcement and intelligence officials schemed to take out Trump and other Republicans,” the Iowa Republican said in his opening statement. “And here we are, in 2026, still finding records from years ago showing even more evidence of targeting.” 

In the latest emails, FBI Agent Walter Giardina repeatedly sought to join the agency's codenamed Crossfire Hurricane investigation into alleged Trump campaign ties to Russia in 2017, offering investigators a new angle in the probe involving campaign fundraising. On the day of Trump’s first inauguration, in 2017, Giardina emailed FBI agent Joe Pientka, saying, “I wanted to mention again my interest in joining the case,” one email shows. 

Grassley’s review shows that Giardina reached out a total of seven times to the Crossfire team. Despite the apparent eagerness to open a new line of inquiry into the Trump campaign’s finances, the records obtained to date show that the case did not advance, Grassley said. 

Last year, Grassley called attention to Giardina as part of a team of FBI agents that appeared to celebrate the indictment of Trump adviser Peter Navarro in 2022, Just the News previously reported. 

At about the same time that Giardina sought to join the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, FBI agents were also probing new Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn’s contacts with the Russian ambassador to the United States. 

Flynn voluntarily sat down with FBI agents Pientka and Peter Strzok just days after the president’s inauguration for an interview about those contacts, as the FBI secretly probed allegations the Trump campaign colluded with Russia. Flynn was charged later that year in federal court in Washington, D.C., with one count of false statements for allegedly lying to Strzok and Pientka about what he told the ambassador, Sergey Kislyak. He eventually agreed to a plea deal.  

However, last week the White House Government Transparency Task Force released declassified, and fully unredacted, documents that show the agents’ long-secret handwritten notes of their interview with Flynn show discrepancies with the bureau's official documents that were used to criminally prosecute Trump’s first national security advisor and pressure him to reach the plea deal, Just the News reported. 

The contemporaneous notes show differences between what the agents wrote down when they interviewed Flynn on Jan. 24, 2017, and what was recorded in the official typed summary of the interview, known as an FD-302, that was entered into the FBI system more than 20 days later and later used to underpin his prosecution.

According to prosecutors, Flynn “falsely stated and represented” to agents that he “did not ask the [Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak] to refrain from escalating the situation in response to sanctions the United States had imposed against Russia” for alleged 2016 election interference.

On December 20, 2016, the same day that Flynn had at least one call with Kislyak, the Obama administration expelled 35 Russian diplomats and authorized the government to respond to Russian cyber operations. 

But Pientka's handwritten notes contain a tantalizing notation apparently attributed to Flynn in the interview about his conversation with Kislyak: “Hey, don't do anything.” 

Likewise, the FBI summary report stated that Flynn recalled making four or five calls the day he talked with the Russian diplomat from a Christmas vacation spot in the Dominican Republic. But Strzok's notes quoted Flynn as saying: “If so, don't remember. If so, busy place to make phone calls.”

The broader Russia collusion investigation itself, under Crossfire Hurricane, has faced mounting scrutiny for following this pattern. 

Declassified documents and Special Counsel John Durham’s findings revealed that the FBI launched and sustained the probe despite possessing no verified intelligence or evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian officials when it was opened. 

Further declassified intelligence showed that the Obama administration was briefed in summer 2016 on a Clinton campaign plan to link Trump to Russia, yet the bureau relied heavily on the unverified political opposition research project known as the Steele Dossier, which was funded by the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign, to secure FISA surveillance warrants against Trump campaign associate Carter Page and underpin its own intelligence assessments. 

The pattern continued in the Justice Department and FBI’s investigation of Trump for the second time over dual-pronged allegations that the then-former president had improperly retained classified materials and engaged in efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.  

As part of that effort, the FBI raided Trump’s Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago, in August 2022. 

Internal FBI memos and emails declassified last year by FBI Director Kash Patel and then-Attorney General Pam Bondi revealed, however, that frontline FBI agents repeatedly questioned whether the Justice Department had sufficient probable cause to conduct a search warrant raid on the estate. The August 8, 2022, raid proceeded under authorization from then-Attorney General Merrick Garland.

The documents show agents in the FBI’s Washington Field Office raised serious doubts about searching private areas, such as Trump's personal office and bedroom, noting that the bureau had not generated new facts or evidence to justify expanded search parameters.

Despite the objections, Biden-era Justice Department officials pushed to expand the scope of the warrant and flatly rejected FBI recommendations to seek cooperation or reach accommodation with Trump’s legal team, Just the News previously reported.  

Furthermore, when FBI agents urged that any search be conducted in a professional manner mindful of political optics, senior DOJ leadership brushed off the concerns, with then-Deputy Assistant Attorney General George Toscas memorialized as stating he “frankly doesn’t give a damn about the optics.”