Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley has escalated a years long campaign against Swiss banking giant UBS and its predecessor Credit Suisse, calling on President Donald Trump to sign an executive order compelling federal agencies to declassify records connected to Nazi war crimes. The request, made in a letter to the White House, marks a significant intensification of the Iowa Republican’s push to force full transparency from a bank he says has repeatedly obstructed investigators digging into its wartime past.

Grassley urged Trump to force federal agencies to declassify documents, raising the stakes in his years long pressure campaign against UBS and predecessor bank Credit Suisse. Neither the White House nor UBS — which acquired Credit Suisse a few years ago — immediately responded to requests for comment on the letter.

In his message to the president, Grassley described a bipartisan investigation he has led since April 2023, saying it has revealed previously undisclosed and unknown Nazi-linked accounts at Credit Suisse. The senator wrote that his inquiry, alongside related probes into the Holocaust era, has uncovered hundreds of undisclosed Nazi-linked accounts, the theft of money and gold, and the looting of treasured artwork.

To bolster his case for executive action, Grassley pointed to a recent precedent set by the president himself. He cited Trump’s January 2025 order declassifying documents related to the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. as a model for the kind of sweeping disclosure he is now seeking regarding Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act materials. Grassley’s letter argued that a new executive order requiring the release of any unreleased material under that law — including still-classified records that warrant declassification review — would send an important signal about the government’s commitment to historical transparency.

A Years long Fight Over Wartime Records

Grassley’s appeal to the White House is the latest chapter in an investigation that traces back more than three years, when he first began examining how Credit Suisse handled accounts tied to Nazi officials, collaborators, and the networks that helped war criminals escape justice after 1945. The probe gained new urgency after Credit Suisse’s 2023 collapse and its emergency, government-brokered acquisition by rival UBS — a deal that left UBS holding responsibility for an investigation it did not start but has since found itself unable to escape.

At the center of that investigation is Neil Barofsky, the........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)