Today, the Senate Judiciary Committee stalled the vote on Kash Patel’s nomination another week.

A bunch of Republicans are wailing that Democrats are afraid of something.

But it’s clear Chuck Grassley is.

A week ago, he released a bunch of documents he read in Kash Patel’s confirmation hearing. They show that DOJ first opened a grand jury to investigate the fake electors plot on January 31, 2022. But FBI delayed two months, from February 12, 2022, at which point they had a draft opening Electronic Communication, to April 13, when they finally approved it. (I’ve included those dates in this timeline.)

• 220212 Draft EC
• 220224 Include Trump
• 220224 Barr Memo
• 220225 List of Subjects
• 220322 Draft EC that removes Trump
• 220325 Draft EC review
• 220411 Thibault approve
• 220412 DD signed
• 220413 Thibault to Crabb

The documentation shows that on both the FBI and DOJ side, top executives approved the investigation, as required by DIOG.

Grassley claims blah blah blah it’s not clear what about politicization, based on his debunked claims about Tim Thibault (claims that Jim Jordan’s committee debunked).

Remember: Tim Thibault is one of the three FBI Agents who opened an investigation targeting Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation during the 2016 election cycle, based substantially on Peter Schweizer’s book. That’s the guy the right wingers have spun up as a raging lefty. That’s the guy who was involved in stalling the investigation of Trump for two months.

But the reason Chuck Grassley is sharing this is … mostly hot air, to justify Pam Bondi’s witch hunts.

And also to justify refusing to find out what Kash Patel is covering up about his 2022 grand jury testimony. Chuck Grassley appears to be using his own misrepresentations of Tim Thibault’s role in all this to refuse to support any inquiry into Kash’s grand jury testimony, apparently claiming that the entire Jack Smith investigation — both prongs of which were predicated long before he was hired — was thereby tainted. In a letter following up on that, Sheldon Whitehouse, Cory Booker, and Adam Schiff (but no one else, up to and including Dick Durbin) urge Grassley to reconsider his refusal to demand Kash’s grand jury testimony.

We write to object to Kash Patel’s continued refusal to provide members of the Senate Judiciary Committee information essential to our consideration of his nomination to be Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Mr. Patel has repeatedly refused to discuss the testimony he provided to a federal grand jury investigating Donald Trump’s unlawful retention of classified documents, as well as his invocation of his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination. We regret that you have rejected our efforts to inquire into the first-ever invocation of Fifth Amendment protection by a nominee seeking to lead the FBI.

Democrats are trying to figure out what Kash Patel believed, in October 2022, that he had criminal exposure in an Espionage Act investigation.

And Chuck Grassley wants to use the fact that the FBI stalled the January 6 investigation into Donald Trump for two months as an excuse to refuse that.