Deep State Cited Wikipedia To Try To Launch Trump Investigation

Walter Giardina — an FBI agent whistleblowers claim “openly stated his desire to investigate Trump, even if it meant false predication” — cited a Wikipedia article in support of launching yet another investigation of Donald Trump. That detail is but one of the crazier revelations buried in the latest cache of documents Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, made public last week in conjunction with FBI Director Kash Patel’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

As The Federalist previously reported, last week Patel testified before “the Senate Judiciary Committee on a wide-range of topics.” He dropped in the middle of the four-hour-plus hearing news related to the ongoing investigation of the weaponization of the FBI: The FBI had “made up” the Round River “classification,” Patel told Grassley on Tuesday.

For several years, Grassley has led an investigation into the weaponization of the FBI, including the launch of the Round River investigation, which whistleblowers told the Iowa senator sought to “improperly discredit negative Hunter Biden information as disinformation and caused investigative activity to cease.” While Patel’s confirmation that the Round River “classification” was fraudulent and that his team was investigating “the individuals who launched and codified this false and fake [classification],” represented the biggest news of the day, the documents Grassley released in connection with the hearing revealed many more troubling details about the weaponization of the FBI.

Walter Giardina’s Get-Trump Obsession

Featured heavily in last week’s document dump was Walter Giardina. The documents released on Tuesday by Grassley’s office include multiple email threads showing Giardina had repeatedly — seven times in four weeks — attempted to join the Crossfire Hurricane team. Giardina’s efforts contradict claims “by former FBI officials that agents don’t get to pick their cases.”

Not only did Giardina try to force his way onto Crossfire Hurricane, but the emails released show he pushed for the launch of a new case against Trump based on supposed campaign finance violations — even before Trump’s first inauguration. A January 12, 2017 email from fellow anti-Trump FBI agent Tim Thibault revealed Giardina’s plot. In that email to his Washington Field Office supervisor, Joe Pientka, Thibault noted that Giardina “has a[n] open source reporting on info related to questionable fundraising activities by the Trump campaign.”

Additional emails showed Thibault’s efforts to sell Giardina to Supervisory Special Agent Pientka proved successful, with Pientka responding that he would discuss Giardina’s interest in providing assistance “with Jeff Rhue who has taken my CROSSFIRE portfolio at HQ and has started a new Illicit Influence Activities Team.” Pientka then asked Giardina to “link up” with him.

Another email dated January 20, 2017, noted Giardina was pulling “FEC papers, financial disclosures and talking to a source” related to the proposed investigation. Then, on February 27, 2017, Giardina explained that his Washington Field Office’s federal public corruption squad was “in the process of opening a campaign finance violation case pertaining to the 2016 election.”

A little over a month later, on April 5, 2017, Giardina met with Vivien Moon from the FBI Washington, D.C. field office about the investigation and followed up with a recommendation that she read the “Wikipedia page on Chain Bridge bank,” which summarized the bank’s history and its status since John McCain moved his campaign funds there as “the preferred bank of the Republican Party.” Giardina then shared that recommendation with Thibault.

That’s right folks: FBI Agent Giardina sought to support an investigation against President Trump based on information from a Wikipedia page.

Those efforts failed, however, at least according to records obtained by Grassley’s team to date, with the investigation of supposed campaign finance violations never advancing.

But There’s More

Giardina’s efforts to launch another investigation into Trump was not the only new investigation he sought to start. According to Grassley, he also tried to open a case on Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz. And another agent, Kevin Gounaud, who collaborated with Giardina to launch the campaign finance case against Trump, also pushed to launch a criminal case against Elon Musk — something so farcical he ended his email pitching the proposed Musk investigation by stressing: “And no, I’m not kidding.”

Specifically, Gounaud suggested in a February 22, 2025, email to a fellow Washington field office agent that they open a criminal matter on the person or persons in the Office of Personal Management who approved the sending of an email asking government employees to “reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager.” According to Gounaud’s email, by asking for employees to report a list of five accomplishments to OPM, the OPM employee conspired with Elon Musk to obtain “sensitive government information outside of a strict need to know.” Gounaud further posited that Musk’s Twitter post about the OPM email “likely violates” federal law.

“Happy to write the case opening and find a prosecutor (or at least try),” Gounaud wrote before stressing in conclusion: “And no, I’m not kidding.”

While nothing appears to have come from Gounaud’s suggestion of opening a criminal investigation into Musk, the Washington Field Office agent’s email suggests Gounaud shared the same anti-Trump weaponization reflex as Giardina and Thibault.

Another thread of emails released last week by Grassley shows a second potential connection between Gounaud and the weaponization of the FBI against the Trump Administration.

Specifically, on February 16, 2017, when Giardina and Thibault were working to launch the campaign finance investigation into Trump, Gounaud emailed the get-Trump duo, telling them he had revised the list of investigative steps Giardina had crafted related to the proposed new investigation of Trump. “These questions are designed to gather available information of possible violations of election crimes or other public corruption-related criminal violations,” Gounaud’s revised outline opened. It then detailed various questions and steps for the agents to undertake in an investigation of the president’s campaign.

The next day, Thibault emailed the revised outline of investigative steps to a higher-up at the Washington Field office named Michael Orlando, as if he (Thibault), had drafted the proposed investigative steps. Orlando then forwarded the email to Jeff Rhule, who as noted above, had taken “CROSSFIRE portfolio at HQ and has started a new Illicit Activities Team within [Cyber Division].” Orlando explained that Tim Thibault would be the proposed agent to coordinate in the investigation, adding that Thibault “sent the below questions to help determine if there are potential criminal violations.” Thibault then forwarded the news to Giardina and Gounaud.

The extent of Gounaud’s involvement with Thibault and Giardina remain unclear, but given the reported efforts by Thibault and Giardina to weaponize the FBI, Gounaud’s apparent assistance in the efforts to launch yet another investigation of Trump proves troubling.

Implications From Strange Alfa Bank Reference

The various email threads released by Grassley on Tuesday also included a passing reference to “Alfa Bank,” which when considered in context should raise some eyebrows.

In a March 10, 2017 email, FBI agent Keith Mularski told Giardina that he was just talking with an individual from PriceWaterhouseCooper (“PwC”), who had done “the intrusion response for the Trump Server incident with Alpha (sic) bank that’s been in the news. He was looking for an FBI contact to give his report to.” “Would that be you,” Mularski asked before adding: “They’ve been able to determine that it wasn’t nefarious and that there was a perfectly logical reason for the incident.”

Giardina responded on March 13, 2017 that “[a]ccording to Tom Grasso, Chicago SA Allison Sands has the Alfa Bank case.” Giardina noted that he hadn’t “spoken to her as yet but have contacted her,” then saying: “I’ll see if she wants to receive this info, if not, I’ll take it.”

The emails released last week contain no further mention of the PwC report — but inexplicably no one else seems to have ever mentioned that analysis of “the Trump Server incident with [Alfa] Bank.” And there should have been some reference to that report given John Durham’s investigation into the Alfa Bank hoax and the Special Counsel’s prosecution of Michael Sussmann.

Readers may recall that in addition to peddling the Steele dossier, the Clinton campaign funded the Alfa Bank hoax, selling to American voters in the run-up to the 2016 election that the Trump organization maintained a secret communications network with Putin through the Russian-based Alfa Bank. A Clinton-backer named Rodney Joffe helped craft the theory, and on September 19, 2016, a Clinton lawyer named Michael Sussmann met with the then-FBI General Counsel James Baker, providing Baker data and whitepapers to supposedly establish the existence of that secret Alfa Bank communications network.

Following Trump’s election in 2016, and after the Russia collusion hoax collapsed, then-Attorney Bill Barr appointed John Durham as special counsel to investigate the FBI’s handling of Crossfire Hurricane and related matters. Among other things, Durham investigating the Alfa Bank hoax and eventually charged Sussmann with lying to Baker. According to the indictment, Sussmann falsely told Baker he was not representing any client when he provided the then-FBI general counsel with the data and whitepapers related to Alfa Bank, when in fact, Sussmann was representing both Clinton and Joffe.

At Sussmann’s trial, FBI agent Allison Sands testified about the investigation into the supposed secret communication’s channel. While Sands testified they concluded there was no basis to the claims, a transcript of her testimony shows no reference to the PwC report which reached the same conclusion. Nor was there any mention of the PwC report in Durham final special counsel report, even though that report detailed the investigation into the Alfa Bank allegations.

The complete absence of any reference to the PwC report leads one to ask: What happened to that information? After all, the individual at PwC believed it important enough to contact the FBI about the report — and understandably so because just one day earlier CNN ran a story claiming the FBI was continuing to investigate the supposed Alfa Bank-Trump Organization link. But PwC had investigated the purported “intrusion” and concluded “it wasn’t nefarious” and “that there was a perfectly logical reason for the incident.”

So, what happened to that report? Did PwC provide it to Sands or to Giardina? And if Giardina received the report, what did he do with it, if anything? Given whistleblowers’ allegations against Giardina and the complete absence of any mention of the PwC report, one must wonder if Giardina withheld that report from Sands or Special Counsel Durham’s office.

FBI Director Patel should task an agent to determine what happened to the PwC report and whether there was any criminality or misconduct involved. Patel should also look into another issue raised in passing by Grassley, namely what FBI employee Jodi Peterson has done to, according to the Iowa senator, be responsible for the “obstruction on many productions, not just Round River.”

While it may seem a little late in the day to worry about these details, the Deep State is just that — deep. And it will take time to expose the extent of alleged misconduct and to ensure all DOJ and FBI employees remain committed to the rule of law and transparency.

Margot Cleveland is an investigative journalist and legal analyst and serves as The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. Margot’s work has been published at The Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, the New Criterion, National Review Online, Townhall.com, the Daily Signal, USA Today, and the Detroit Free Press. She is also a regular guest on nationally syndicated radio programs and on Fox News, Fox Business, and Newsmax. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. Cleveland is also of counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland where you can read more about her greatest accomplishments—her dear husband and dear son. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.