WASHINGTON — Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said on the latest episode of “Pod Force One,” out now, that former President Joe Biden’s legacy will be marred by both his family’s influence peddling and his mental and physical infirmity in office.
“Considering the fact that he doesn’t look like he was running [the White House] at least in [the most] recent two or three years, I think he will never go down in history as a very effective senator or very effective president,” said the 91-year-old, who was first elected to the Senate in 1980, eight years after Biden.
“I got along with him,” Grassley recalled of his relationship with Biden while the pair were on Capitol Hill. “I didn’t think he was corrupt. I didn’t think he was incompetent. I had a pretty good relationship with him for 28 years that we served together … I wouldn’t say I was close. But we worked together on legislation. We got along personally pretty well.”
Grassley went on to claim that Biden changed to such an extent “physically and mentally” after departing the Senate in 2008 to become Barack Obama’s vice president, that much of his unpopular decisions in office were likely driven by aides — including mass pardons and sentence commutations of even some violent offenders.
“Yes. Yes,” the Iowan affirmed Post columnist Miranda Devine’s suggestion to that effect. “When you do 1,000 commutations and pardons, and you don’t pay any attention to what you’re doing [that’s not] your job [anymore].”
The Iowa Republican revealed that he “only had one face-to-face meeting” with Biden during his White House tenure, “but what I’ve learned by what everybody else has said [is] going on and what you observed on TV, that a lot changed since he left the United States Senate.”
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“I think if you feel like you know somebody well, it’s hard to believe some of the things that you originally heard,” added Grassley, saying he might have been “a little naive about how I looked at the President Biden compared to Senator Biden.”
Grassley — whose staff is renowned on Capitol Hill for taking on the toughest investigations in a slow, deliberative fashion — also touted his work first revealing millions of dollars in payments to Hunter Biden from foreign business associates during his father’s vice presidency.
In particular, Grassley pressured then-FBI Director Christopher Wray into turning over a confidential informant file on an alleged $10 million bribe Hunter and Joe Biden pocketed from an executive at the Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma Holdings.
That informant, Alexander Smirnov, was later charged with lying to the feds by the same prosecutor who indicted Hunter for tax and gun felonies in 2023. Smirnov pleaded guilty in December 2024 and was sentenced to six years in prison this past January.
“Well, they’d been paying the informant,” Grassley said of the FBI’s relationship with Smirnov. “They’d been paying the informant for a decade, maybe longer than a decade … and he was giving them misinformation as well.”
The prosecutor, special counsel David Weiss, never filed additional charges against Hunter Biden for having failed to register as a foreign agent during all of his business ventures abroad, claiming there wasn’t enough evidence.
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Former first brother James Biden also joined Hunter in striking deals with Chinese business associates — but was never charged — even after House Republican investigators uncovered checks that landed in Joe’s bank account following a series of transfers.
Biden pardoned his son a month before leaving the White House, despite having promised several times never to do so.
“I’m not surprised,” Grassley said when asked about the sweeping, 11-year clemency, which covered both potential crimes committed between 2014 and 2024 and the extant illegal firearm possession conviction and guilty plea to evading $1.4 million in taxes.
“But it shouldn’t have been done and proves the guilt of Hunter Biden.”
