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Newly released emails from the Senate Judiciary Committee expose how federal agents pushed to open a probe into high-profile Trump ally Elon Musk, adding fresh evidence to a long-running pattern of scrutiny against Donald Trump and his allies.
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.