Whistleblowers

Floor Speech

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Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, today, I am here to again speak about the New York Times' anti-whistleblower reporting. Obviously, it is very misleading.

On January 18, 2026, Glenn Thrush, Alan Feuer, and Adam Goldman gave another big, wet kiss to their fired friends from the Biden Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and they did so in an effort to intimidate, to smear, and to discredit brave and patriotic whistleblowers. This has now become a pattern of conduct by the New York Times, dating back to articles starting in 2023.

On January 30, 2025, Alan Feuer and Adam Goldman mischaracterized my and Senator Johnson's Arctic Frost disclosures by saying ``messages showed that FBI investigators took normal bureaucratic steps and precautions'' when opening the case.

Now, was this supposed to be an opinion piece on behalf of terminated FBI agents or a real news article?

Normal steps weren't taken. As I noted in my February 3, 2025, floor speech about FBI agent Thibault:

Does the New York Times [truly] believe that it is normal for an Assistant Special Agent in Charge to prepare case predication for the opening of an investigation and then feed it to a street agent?

Is it normal for an Assistant Special Agent in Charge responsible for the most sensitive political investigations in the FBI to be forced to resign for partisanship on the job and then be found to have violated the Hatch Act for that same partisanship?

These two New York Times articles are merely examples out of others that could be addressed with the same rebuttals. So, in the interest of time, I will only address the January 18, 2026, article that I came here to discuss with my colleagues.

In that article, Thrush, Feuer, and Goldman issued the same slobbering defense of fired FBI agents whose emails Senator Johnson and I made public. So who does the Times end up attacking? They have chosen this Senator, and they have also chosen to attack my whistleblowers.

First, Thrush, Feuer, and Goldman did get something right. Can you believe that? They said the FBI is producing records ``in response to longstanding inquiries by Republicans on Capitol Hill.'' The House and Senate have finally begun to receive responsive productions to our oversight requests as the New York Times has correctly stated. Some of those requests date back many years. Indeed, some requests date back to the first Trump administration. This isn't a scandal the Times would like to create. The Justice Department and the FBI have an obligation to respond to congressional inquiries.

To Attorney General Bondi's and FBI Director Patel's credit, they have done better in that regard than any of their predecessors of Republican Presidents and Democrat Presidents. Now, am I fully satisfied? Of course not, but Bondi and Patel deserve credit. If the Biden administration had done the same, I would have given the Biden administration credit as well.

By and large, the records I have made public in this and the last Congress are directly from whistleblowers in unredacted form to which my office applied limited redactions or the records are from the government in response to whistleblower disclosures that I have shared.

There have been examples in this Congress and the last where the government had no idea what records were in the files of the executive branch of government until I transmitted whistleblower disclosures to that same executive branch, the most recent being the email about an FBI agent wanting to criminally investigate Elon Musk. This, too, is not a scandal that the Times would like to imply because that is called good government oversight, and I have done good government oversight all of my career in the Senate.

Second, the Times said I called the raid at Mar-a-Lago, where the FBI reportedly searched the rooms of the First Lady and Barron Trump, a miscarriage of justice. Of course, when the Times said that, they didn't include my full tweet. They left out the beginning of the sentence where I said: ``Based on the records'' those records showed that the FBI agents had many concerns about the raid and ``will not do'' the search warrant unless the Deputy Director were to provide direction.

These are records that were covered up by the Biden administration. Indeed, the public ought to know and give credit to those FBI agents for expressing their concerns and doing it in writing; in other words, following what the law requires.

I gave the same credit to FBI agents who were obstructed by their leadership and then-Secretary of State John Kerry during the Obama administration. For example, at that time, I released a majority staff report just last year. That report made public FBI emails that showed agents tried to arrest high-level Iranians but were stopped from making those arrests. Those agents were stopped then from doing their jobs because of political considerations relating to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal that President Obama was so intent upon getting finalized.

Lastly, I released records this year showing FBI agents wanting to investigate election matters but were obstructed. Those agents created an investigative document that was suppressed, in part, because the information would have contradicted then-FBI Director Wray's testimony. The records show real frustration among the FBI rank and file. Again, I made this information public to inform the American people and to give due credit to those agents who were standing up for their work and following the law.

Relating back to the Times article, the third issue to raise is that Thrush, Feuer, and Goldman did something unforgivable. That unforgivable thing was their article essentially accusing my whistleblowers of violating the law. It does so, in part, by citing a complaint filed by J.P. Cooney and Molly Gaston. These were two of Jack Smith's partisan prosecutors--prosecutors with a mission to put President Trump in prison when he was a private citizen while he was between his two terms in office. J.P. Cooney and Molly Gaston reportedly accused the whistleblower disclosures of violating grand jury secrecy rules when I obtained 197 of Jack Smith's subpoenas--wide- ranging subpoenas--that violated the privacy of a lot of people, including a lot of Members of the Senate and Congress.

Senator Johnson and I then made these subpoenas public--almost 2,000 pages of information. That information exposed that Jack Smith, the prosecutor, and his team targeted over 400 Republican individuals and Republican and conservative organizations. In some cases, Prosecutor Smith and his team sought communications with the media and the legislative branch. J.P. Cooney and Molly Gaston were a part of Jack Smith's team; so that reported complaint they filed against my whistleblowers is littered with a lot of conflict of interest.

But let's focus on this: Prosecutor Smith and his team sought communications with the media. Instead of the New York Times investigating and reporting on that major constitutional red flag, the Times brushes it aside and gladly runs with the false accusations from Cooney and Gaston against my whistleblowers. In doing so, the Times also links a 2020 Justice Department opinion memo to the article to try and support Cooney's and Gaston's whistleblower-chilling efforts.

The Department of Justice's opinion was scoped to ``leaks to the press [of] confidential information concerning prosecutorial decision- making.'' The whistleblower disclosures were to Congress, not to the media.

The same Department of Justice's opinion also says in footnote No. 2 that a separate statutory provision exists that ``protects disclosure to Congress using significantly different language and raises distinct issues that we don't discuss in this opinion.''

The same Department of Justice opinion also says, in part, that an employee is provided whistleblower protection ``when the employee reasonably believes that the disclosure reveals a violation of law or rules or exposes serious wrongdoing as defined by statute.''

Thrush, Feuer, and Goldman's opinion piece fails three ways. They misled the public by creating a false narrative that whistleblower disclosures provided to me and Senator Johnson were somehow illegal.

Moreover, a fundamental precept of whistleblowing is the First Amendment. I thought the New York Times and its left-leaning compatriots loved the First Amendment.

Here, in this January 18 article, the Times shreds the First Amendment and, in doing so, undermines and devalues patriotic whistleblowers. That is an historic disgrace that will age very poorly for these authors, their editors, and the New York Times at large.

The January 18 article also argues that my critics say these whistleblowers won't face reprisal because Trump is in office. Reprisal isn't a condition precedent to be a whistleblower. And how dare the Times make any insinuation that my whistleblowers haven't put themselves at risk. Whether there is a Republican or Democrat running the White House, whistleblowers always face real risk: ruining themselves professionally, losing their job, all that and more. And mine--my whistleblowers--have faced years of risk because their disclosures to me have occurred over a period of years, not just during the Trump administration.

Here, too, the Times and the authors try very hard to undercut the assertion that my whistleblowers are protected by law. It is an act done to chill, to intimidate, and to smear patriotic government workers.

In closing, perhaps the most disappointing element of this article is the quote from the Government Accountability Project. The Government Accountability Project is a group that I have worked with for decades on legislation and whistleblowers, and I consider them a very fine organization, not only helping whistleblowers, but helping all of Congress in our responsibility of oversight to see that the executive branch faithfully executes the laws according to the constitutional requirement.

The Government Accountability Project said this to the Times about my whistleblowers not facing any risk of reprisal:

There is no risk, given that it looks like the entities who ordinarily might retaliate apparently might be behind the release.

This is a shameful statement for the New York Times and their authors to make. So my office approached the Government Accountability Project, and this is what they told us: First, the Government Accountability Project apologized. They said about the New York Times article:

It is not something the Government Accountability Project wanted to have our organization part of.

Second, the Government Accountability Project said the quoted employee ``is a contract lawyer who isn't authorized to speak for the organization beyond his clients.''

The Government Accountability Project asked the Times to make that correction, but, ``unfortunately, they declined.''

Third, the Government Accountability Project said it didn't stand behind the statement, as it ``violated Government Accountability Project standards, because it was speculative rather than evidence based.''

Fourth, the Government Accountability Project said the quoted employee ``didn't know the context when a reporter asked him a hypothetical question and has promised to check before any future public statements that could overlap with Judiciary Committee work.''

So I hope it is clear. It appears that, based on Government Accountability Project's representations to my office, the New York Times misled the Government Accountability Project employee to get a quote, as you could expect, that would fit the Times' predetermined narrative--so much for following the facts and the evidence, as you would expect any journalist to do.

The Government Accountability Project also submitted a letter to the editor in support of this Senator. I thank the organization for doing that.

What really shoddy work by Thrush, Feuer, and Goldman. Thanks to these three reporters, the New York Times is a paper of record when it comes to attacking and undermining whistleblowers.

So I say to my whistleblowers: I will defend you. I will protect you. I will continue to make public the records that you are giving to me.

And so to the New York Times, shame is not a strong enough word to describe these unprofessional articles.

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