FBI Files Reveal Musk Case Pitch — And Agent’s Seven Bids To Join Trump-Russia Probe
One FBI agent asked at least seven times to join the Trump-Russia investigation.
Another was ready to build a criminal case around Elon Musk’s demand that federal workers list five things they had accomplished on the job.
Newly released internal emails show how individual agents pushed to get involved in two of Washington’s most politically charged matters — prompting Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley to accuse former bureau personnel of political bias.
The Iowa Republican released the records Tuesday during an FBI oversight hearing with Director Kash Patel.
The headline-grabber is a Feb. 22, 2025, email from then-agent Kevin Gounaud, who proposed opening a criminal matter tied to the government-wide “five things” email sent to federal employees during Musk’s stint as a special government employee advising the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency effort.
Gounaud argued that officials at the Office of Personnel Management may have conspired with Musk to send sensitive information beyond a need-to-know circle. He also claimed Musk’s use of X — the social-media platform he owns — for government-related messaging could have financially benefited him and raised a conflict-of-interest issue.
The agent even compared the situation to Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state, according to the email released by Grassley.
Gounaud told a supervisor he was prepared to write the case opening and try to find a prosecutor.
“And no, I’m not kidding,” he added.
But the released record does not show that prosecutors accepted Gounaud’s theory, that the bureau opened a Musk investigation or that Musk was charged with any crime. Fox News reported that Gounaud left the FBI in February 2026.
The email landed in an already chaotic episode inside the federal workforce. Musk had posted on X that employees would receive an email asking what they had accomplished during the previous week and that failing to respond would be treated as a resignation.
The official OPM guidance, issued two days after Gounaud’s message, was narrower. It told workers to provide roughly five bullet points, copy their managers and send no classified information, links or attachments. It also said agency leaders would decide what action, if any, to take against nonresponders and could exempt categories of employees. OPM rescinded the guidance in August 2025.
For Grassley, the Musk email was only half the story.
The second batch of records dates to January and February 2017 and shows then-agent Walter Giardina repeatedly seeking a place on Crossfire Hurricane, the FBI counterintelligence investigation into possible links between Russia and Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign.
According to the emails released by Grassley, Giardina made at least seven requests over roughly four weeks to join the team or help launch a related sub-case.
On Trump’s Inauguration Day, Giardina again emailed supervisory agent Joe Pientka to flag his “interest in joining the case,” Grassley said in his opening statement.
The correspondence also included Timothy Thibault, a former FBI assistant special agent in charge whom Grassley has repeatedly accused of anti-Trump bias. The U.S. Office of Special Counsel later found that Thibault violated the Hatch Act through partisan social-media activity while employed by the FBI. Because Thibault had retired, the office issued a warning letter and closed the matter without further action.
Grassley said the Giardina-related sub-case did not advance, based on the records available so far. He argued that the repeated requests, coupled with Gounaud’s Musk pitch, undercut past assurances that individual agents cannot simply choose their own cases.
“That’s arguably worse than Watergate,” Grassley said as he accused officials in the Obama and Biden administrations of running politically motivated operations. His “Deep State” claim is a political characterization; the released emails document the agents’ requests and proposals, but do not by themselves establish a coordinated conspiracy across two administrations.
Crossfire Hurricane remains a controversial chapter in FBI history. Special Counsel Robert Mueller documented extensive Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 election, but his office did not establish that the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in that interference.
A Justice Department inspector general review concluded that the FBI had sufficient predication to open Crossfire Hurricane and did not find documentary or testimonial evidence that political bias drove the opening decisions. The same review identified serious errors and omissions in surveillance applications targeting former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, failures that triggered lasting scrutiny of the bureau’s use of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
Special Counsel John Durham later delivered a harsher assessment, faulting the FBI for failing to uphold its standards of analytical rigor when it launched and pursued aspects of the investigation. His multiyear criminal inquiry produced one guilty plea; two other defendants were acquitted.
That mixed official record is why the newly surfaced emails matter — and why they require careful reading.
They do not show that either proposal became an opened case. They do document agents pressing for politically sensitive work, sometimes in blunt language, amid an intense national dispute over Trump, Russia and the conduct of federal law enforcement.
Years later, those internal messages have become evidence in Congress’s continuing fight over political bias and accountability at the FBI.
