5 minutes:

So here goes Don Quixote Grassley tilting his lance at a wind mill and hoping he hits Joe Biden. Grassley has been on his quest now for what seems like a decade, but actually started just as soon as Biden was elected president. 

During his crusade Chuckles has trusted a whistleblower who has turned out to be a Chinese spy and trusted in statements that have been proven false. Doesn’t bother Chuckles. He just keeps tilting at windmills in hopes he hits a Biden someday.

While the rest of his MAGA Party is all consumed in proving that Donald Trump is innocent of crimes he committed in the light of day on TV, Grassley has chosen his niche in the MAGA movement to be proving that Joe Biden has committed crimes that never happened and that investigations have proven never existed. But Chuckles is gliding into his 90th birthday and maybe he needs a hobby to keep him busy.

As the Mark Sumner at dailykos.com notes after Grassley once again broke Senate norms to spread his lies about Biden last week:  

Sen. Chuck Grassley released an FBI FD-1023 form related to the Hunter Biden investigation. These forms are not intended to be public documents and it is highly unusual to release them publicly. These are the forms that the FBI uses to “record raw, unverified reporting from confidential human sources.” They do not represent the results of investigations, and “recording this information does not validate it or establish its credibility.”

These forms are not classified, but they are kept in confidence for a number of reasons that are mostly connected with protecting sources. The FBI has made it clear to Grassley repeatedly that releasing the form would have a negative impact not just on this case, but on every case that depends on confidential human sources.

Grassley released it anyway because he has placed what he sees as a momentary opportunity to hurt President Joe Biden over the needs of the FBI and the good of the nation. More than that, Grassley is doing this to forward a story that he knows is a lie.

Sumner fills in much of the detail of this story and the investigation. He then tells how Rudy Giuliani fabricated the whole story and put Biden in the whole mess:

That moment when Giuliani was making calls directly to the White House from the office of an outgoing official is the genesis of the idea that Joe Biden took some kind of payment from Burisma. Until that moment, it had come up nowhere. From no one.

Over the following months, Giuliani assembled a group of known criminals and former members of the pro-Russian government who had been ousted with the election of Volodymyr Zelenskyy. He found several willing to play along with his growing story, but they had a price: They wanted Trump to get rid of U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, who was too effective in fighting corruption. Trump gave them exactly what they wanted to get his false evidence against Biden, but even in 2019 the holes in the story were so big that the whole scheme was obviously a … scheme.

Now it’s back again and nothing has changed. The document that the FBI held was clearly authored by someone who was part of Giuliani’s plot, and it was clearly Giuliani himself who pointed out this document to Grassley and others. The document contains exactly the same false, easily disproved claims as the story the Times printed up for Giuliani and was obviously written with the sole purpose of providing some faux documentary evidence for the story Giuliani and Trump were pushing at the time. It’s all part of what Trump was trying to get Zelenskyy to say when he made his impeachment-worthy phone call to the Ukrainian leader.

Sumner has a great summary – noting especially that Grassley purposely released the FBI document even though he knew it was a lie. Sumner makes a point at the end that (surprise, surprise!) Grassley is corrupt:

Grassley purposely released a document that he knew was a lie for the purpose of attacking Joe Biden even though he knew it would put Americans in danger and damage the FBI’s ability to investigate actual crimes of all sorts.

To gain a moment of political attention, Grassley is creating an immeasurable risk. How can witnesses come to the FBI to make a confidential statement knowing that their identities and claims can be revealed for political expediency by someone who has no real interest in the truth?

There is a genuine broad streak of corruption in this case, and it runs right through Iowa. (bolding mine – Ed.)

Meanwhile, as the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Chuckles has come out strongly against ethics for Supreme Court justices. From Radio Iowa:

Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley says he opposes a bill that’s advanced in the U.S. Senate which would create a code of ethics for U.S. Supreme Court justices.

Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, says the Democrat-backed bill passed the panel 11-to-10 last week on a party line vote.

Now why would Chuckles oppose the SCOTUS justices having a real set of ethics rule and not one that SCOTUS created itself that has few rules and no teeth? Remember back in 2016 when Grassley played THE major role in stopping a hearing for President Obama’s pick to replace Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court even though it is prescribed by the constitution? Can you say corruption?

Having been instrumental in creating the worst SCOTUS in the country’s history, Grassley wants to keep it in power. If real ethics were imposed on the current Court, the result could be devastating to the sitting justices. Each of the current Republican sitting justices have serious breaches of ethics all starting with lying to congress at their nomination hearings.

But righteous Chuckles cares not what is good for the country, or Iowa. Chuck only cares what is good for the MAGA party.

Just a last comment: Grassley should be hammered by the press in this state about these two incidents and. Many other. Yet Iowa’s compliant press may ask a question, no followup and move on. I do not know if they fear Grassley or what. In the constitution mentions the press specifically because the press is supposed to be a check on government. Towa’s press must grow a spine.