Internal FBI communications obtained by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley reveal that high-level DOJ prosecutors and FBI agents were actively seeking ways to launch yet another investigation into Donald Trump in 2023 — this time, based on a news article about his brief collaboration with January 6 defendants on a patriotic choir project.
The email trail, first reported by The New York Post, centers around a March 2023 message from prosecutor JP Cooney, a key figure in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team, who previously served under Robert Mueller. In the message, Cooney linked to a Forbes article describing Trump’s audio contribution to a single recorded by incarcerated January 6 protesters. He then asked DOJ staff to “nail down Trump’s role in this.”
According to Grassley’s findings, Cooney pushed for investigative steps against Ed Henry’s LLC — the entity routing funds to families of January 6 prisoners — and urged colleagues to examine the business structure. Notably, proceeds were reportedly not being funneled to families of individuals who had assaulted law enforcement, making the project selective in its support. Nevertheless, the DOJ team’s interest in potential legal action over the initiative appears to stem from political optics rather than any clear violation of law.
One of the email’s recipients was FBI Special Agent Walter Giardina, a longtime figure in multiple high-profile investigations targeting Trump and his associates, including Crossfire Hurricane, the Mueller probe, and the controversial arrest of former Trump adviser Peter Navarro. According to Grassley, Giardina was an “initial recipient” of the Steele dossier and later falsely attested to its veracity. He has also been accused by whistleblowers of taking an anti-Trump stance and advocating for investigations even without proper legal grounds.
In this case, Giardina replied that he and another agent were already “working on this today,” referencing their plan to prepare a findings report based solely on the Forbes article and surrounding media coverage — again without reference to any known statutory violations.
Grassley decried the effort as another example of DOJ partisanship masquerading as law enforcement. “Instead of focusing on DOJ and FBI’s core law enforcement responsibilities,” Grassley said, “partisan prosecutors and agents were surfing the web to find any shred of information they could use to spin another baseless case against Trump.”
The Iowa senator, who has worked closely with whistleblowers and former Trump officials like Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, has been seeking internal DOJ and FBI communications to expose what he alleges is a pattern of coordinated political targeting against Trump dating back to 2016.
Additional documents provided by Patel include an FBI intelligence memo allegedly detailing Chinese efforts to produce counterfeit U.S. driver’s licenses tied to fraudulent mail-in ballots in 2020 — a document reportedly withdrawn by the FBI without further investigation despite U.S. Customs seizing tens of thousands of fake IDs.
While the efforts by Special Counsel Smith’s team ultimately failed — Trump won the 2024 election, and the charges related to both January 6 and the Mar-a-Lago documents were dropped — Grassley maintains that the episode reflects systemic misuse of federal investigative power.
