Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley released internal FBI documents showing one agent pushed to open a criminal investigation of Elon Musk and another emailed colleagues at least seven times to get assigned to the bureau's Trump-Russia probe, records Grassley called evidence of something "worse than Watergate."
The documents, made public during a Senate hearing with FBI Director Kash Patel on September 16, 2025, center on two former agents whose internal communications suggest they sought to use their positions to pursue politically charged targets. One agent, Kevin Gounaud, wrote an internal FBI email in February 2025 arguing that Musk's use of X, the platform he owns, to ask government employees to list five things they accomplished each week amounted to a potential crime. The other, Walter Giardina, sent a string of emails beginning in January 2017 requesting assignment to Crossfire Hurricane, the FBI's counterintelligence investigation into whether members of Donald Trump's presidential campaign coordinated with Russian election interference.
Grassley, the Iowa Republican who chairs the Judiciary Committee, framed the documents as part of a pattern of political weaponization inside the FBI that stretched across two Democratic administrations.
Fox News Digital reported that Grassley told the hearing:
"The previous Democrat administrations under Obama and Biden conducted secret, insidious and downright evil operations that almost took down our government. That's arguably worse than Watergate."
Gounaud's email, released by Grassley and posted on the committee's website, laid out a theory that Musk broke the law by using X to communicate what Gounaud described as official government information. At the time, Musk was serving as a special government employee overseeing the Department of Government Efficiency.
Gounaud wrote that Musk "used a non government system (twitter) to relate information that allegedly was for official purposes" and that because Musk is "a majority owner of twitter," he "likely generated income for himself based on Twitter's monetization model and/or advertising revenues." Gounaud then offered a comparison:
"His use of twitter in this and other instances is conceptually similar to Hillary Clinton's misuse of a private email server for government business."
The complaint boiled down to this: Musk posted on his own platform asking federal workers to report what they did during the week, and an FBI agent treated that as grounds for a criminal referral. Gounaud left the bureau in February, according to his LinkedIn profile. The documents do not indicate whether the proposed investigation was ever opened or acted upon.
Grassley highlighted the episode on X, writing that an FBI agent "was ready2 open a CRIMINAL CASE all bc Elon Musk asked govt bureaucrats 2 report 5 things they did in a wk." He added: "Compare that 2 Iowans who work frm sunup to sundown EVERY DAY. Washington rlly is an island surrounded by reality."
The second set of documents involves Giardina, who emailed colleagues at least seven times over four weeks starting in January 2017, lobbying to be placed on the Crossfire Hurricane investigation. The emails released by Grassley show Giardina was in contact with Timothy Thibault, another former agent, and that Thibault was copied on several of Giardina's messages to former Supervising Agent Joe Pientka.
Crossfire Hurricane began in 2016 and was eventually handed off to Special Counsel Robert Mueller in May 2017. Mueller's investigation did not establish a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.
Grassley noted at the hearing that Giardina also attempted to open a case on then-Senator Kyrsten Sinema. Neither effort appears to have advanced, but Grassley argued both episodes undercut a familiar defense from former FBI leadership.
"His efforts, as well as the case he tried to open on Senator Sinema, undercut public statements by former FBI officials that agents don't get to pick their cases."
FBI Director Patel fired Giardina in August over accusations of political weaponization. The article did not specify the year of his termination.
Thibault, the agent who received several of Giardina's emails, has his own record of political conduct inside the bureau. Grassley accused him of violating the Hatch Act, the federal law that bars executive-branch employees from certain political activities, after Thibault reshared a Lincoln Project post on Twitter calling Trump "a psychologically broken, embittered, and deeply unhappy man."
The U.S. Office of Special Counsel investigated and, in January 2024, determined that Thibault did violate the Hatch Act. But Thibault had already retired from the FBI in August 2022, before the investigation concluded. The OSC issued a warning letter and closed the case. No further discipline followed.
That sequence, a confirmed violation, a retirement that outran the investigation, and a letter that carried no consequences, captures the accountability gap Grassley has spent years trying to close.
The documents released at the hearing extended beyond Crossfire Hurricane. Grassley also disclosed new details about Operation Arctic Frost, an FBI investigation originally described as focused on efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. Breitbart reported that whistleblower evidence presented by Grassley showed Arctic Frost targeted 92 Republican groups and individuals, including Turning Point USA, founded by the late Charlie Kirk, and the Republican National Committee.
Grassley told the hearing that the operation went well beyond any legitimate investigative purpose:
"Arctic Frost wasn't just a case to politically investigate Trump. It was the vehicle by which partisan FBI agents and Department of Justice prosecutors could achieve their partisan ends and improperly investigate the entire Republican political apparatus."
Arctic Frost was opened and approved by Thibault, the same agent later found to have violated the Hatch Act, and eventually became the basis for Special Counsel Jack Smith's elector case against Trump. One FBI agent, upon learning of the decision to prosecute Trump adviser Peter Navarro for contempt of Congress, responded with "Wow, great," according to the records Grassley released.
The Senate Judiciary Committee has, under Grassley's direction, released several rounds of internal FBI documents over the past decade, including records from Operations Arctic Frost and Round River. Fox News Digital reached out to the FBI for comment on the latest release but did not report receiving a response.
Grassley has spent years building a public record of what he describes as institutional rot inside the FBI. The documents released at the Patel hearing add two new names, Gounaud and Giardina, to a roster of agents whose internal communications suggest they viewed their badges as tools for political combat rather than law enforcement.
Grassley put it bluntly at the hearing:
"The overall sustained efforts by the Deep State in the dark corners of the bureaucracy is worse than anything Trump has been accused of. At least he's upfront and open so people can judge."
Several questions remain unanswered. The released documents do not show whether Gounaud's proposed criminal case against Musk was ever formally opened or rejected. The details of Giardina's attempted case against then-Senator Sinema are unexplained. And the full scope of the "broader batch" of documents Grassley released alongside these records has not been fully described.
When a federal agent can try to open a criminal case because a government adviser asked bureaucrats to list what they did all week, the problem is not one rogue employee. It is a culture that rewarded political ambition and called it public service.
