Prepared Opening Statement by Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa
Chairman, Senate Judiciary Committee
Executive Business Meeting
Thursday, June 5, 2025
Good morning. On today's agenda, we have six nominations. Five are listed for the first time and will be held over. Our only vote today will be on David Waterman to be United States Attorney for the Southern District of Iowa.
Senator Ernst and I have recommended Mr. Waterman for this position for two Congresses in a row, and he was previously voted out of our Committee with an overwhelming, bipartisan vote. I’m pleased that we’re voting on him today and urge all of my colleagues to support him.
We also have S.1829, the STOP CSAM Act, listed on the agenda for the first time. That bill increases protections for kids online and will be held over until next week.
I want to take a moment to address recently raised concerns about the Justice Department’s grant terminations. I’ve started looking into some of these redirected funds and am releasing a short report compiling publicly available information on two grant recipients. I’ll focus on one example—the Vera Institute of Justice.
Vera is a George Soros-backed organization. It’s received at least $10 million in donations from him. Everyone here knows Soros’ plan to elect progressive prosecutors to district attorney positions. Folks may be less familiar with Vera’s role in that plan, though they’ve made no secret about it.
Many of them gave Vera space in their office and nearly unfettered access to their case files. They allowed Vera to redesign their prosecutor offices around Soros’s progressive vision.
Guided by Vera, these prosecutors failed their communities. The sad stories of their failures played out in the courtroom, where rape victims and families who lost loved ones to violence never saw an ounce of justice.
Vera’s policies aren’t criminal justice reform. A revolving door of no consequences doesn’t make anyone safer or rehabilitated.
We need to continue looking at these grants. The Justice Department should reinstate worthy grants, and several have been reinstated. But awards to grantees like Vera for broken progressive policies should give us all pause. The American people voted those policies out of office.
I also want to take a moment to discuss some of my other recent oversight work.
Thanks to whistleblowers, I made public last week an FBI document that showed Nellie Ohr, who’s firm was paid by the Democrat National Committee, lied to Congress.
She lied about her role in creating the Steele Dossier and pushing the Russia hoax. She got away scot-free while Trump and his associates were politically targeted for years.
That document also exposed the FBI’s use of access restrictions on some of Mueller’s Crossfire Hurricane material.
Incredibly, those access restrictions prevented FBI agents from accessing FBI records.
And if that happened, it means congressional oversight requests and court cases were subject to the same obstructive conduct.
New FBI leadership ought to immediately perform a comprehensive review of these access restrictions.
My oversight has just begun on this matter.
Now, you all remember the FBI’s infamous Richmond memo.
That memo used the shoddy research of the radical Southern Poverty Law Center to accuse traditional Catholics of being violent extremists.
Well, the FBI recently produced Biden-era documents, which I released Tuesday, showing the problem was much worse than Director Wray led us to believe.
There wasn’t just one FBI document that used biased anti-Catholic sources, but over a dozen. The anti-Catholic memo was distributed far more broadly than the FBI told Congress. And more FBI field offices were involved than we’d been led to believe.
Based on those FBI records, it appears Wray lied to Congress.
My oversight on all these matters will continue.
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