An FBI special agent at the heart of whistleblower allegations that he sabotaged the agency’s 2020 investigation of Hunter Biden has been escorted out of the bureau’s Washington DC field office, and was seen “exiting the bureau’s elevator last Friday escorted by two or three “headquarters-looking types,”” according to the Washington Times.
Timothy Thibault, who was in charge at the Washington field office until “relatively recently,” was on leave for at least a month following revelations over political statements he made while leading the public corruption unit.
Thibault, among other things, made anti-Trump statements over social media in 2020 while he was helping to lead the FBI’s probe of Hunter Biden, while his father, Joe Biden, was running for the White House. The FBI boss also retweeted a post by the Lincoln Project which called Trump “a psychologically broken, embittered and deeply unhappy man.”
During recent testimony before the Senate, FBI Director Christopher A. Wray dodged questions about Mr. Thibault and his social media posts. He called it “ongoing personnel matters.”
Mr. Thibault, according to the former official, was also known for pushing out unvaccinated agents from the FBI’s election squad that he suspected to be Trump supporters.
One of the former officials, who is also a whistleblower talking to the House Judiciary Committee, was placed on indefinite suspension last year by the bureau because he attended the “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, that preceded a pro-Trump mob storming of the Capitol. The former officials said he never entered the Capitol.
After resigning late last year, he claimed other FBI officials were “purged” for attending the rally on their own time and not on official FBI business. -Washington Times
In late May, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) sought records from the DOJ regarding Thibault’s work history following the accusations of political bias.
“Political bias should have no place at the FBI, and the effort to revive the FBI’s credibility can’t stop with his exit. We need accountability, which is why Congress must continue investigating and the inspector general must fully investigate as I’ve requested,” he told the Times in a statement.
Meanwhile, several FBI whistleblowers told Grassley earlier this year that agents investigating Hunter Biden “opened an assessment which was used by an FBI headquarters team to improperly discredit negative Hunter Biden information as disinformation and caused investigative activity to cease,” adding that his office received “a significant number of protected communications from highly credible whistleblowers” regarding the investigation.
Grassley added that “verified and verifiable derogatory information on Hunter Biden was falsely labeled as disinformation,” according to the Washington Examiner.
FBI supervisory intelligence agent Brian Auten opened in August 2020 the assessment that was later used by the agency, according to the disclosures. One of the whistleblowers claimed the FBI assistant special agent in charge of the Washington field office, Timothy Thibault, shut down a line of inquiry into Hunter Biden in October 2020 despite some of the details being known to be true at the time.
A whistleblower also said Thibault “ordered closed” an “avenue of additional derogatory Hunter Biden reporting,” according to Grassley, even though “all of the reporting was either verified or verifiable via criminal search warrants.” The senator said Thibault “ordered the matter closed without providing a valid reason as required” and that FBI officials “subsequently attempted to improperly mark the matter in FBI systems so that it could not be opened in the future,” according to the disclosures.
The whistleblowers say investigators from FBI headquarters were “in communication with FBI agents responsible for the Hunter Biden information targeted by Mr. Auten’s assessment,” and that their findings on whether the claims were in fact disinformation were placed “in a restricted access sub-file” in September 2020, according to Grassley, who added that the disclosures “appear to indicate that there was a scheme in place among certain FBI officials to undermine derogatory information connected to Hunter Biden by falsely suggesting it was disinformation.”
Amid the revelations that the FBI told Facebook to quash the Hunter Biden laptop story – a clear case of election interference, Trump called for an “immediate” redo of the 2020 election,
Last week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed that the FBI told them to be on the lookout for “Russian propaganda.”
“Basically, the background here is the FBI, I think, basically came to us- some folks on our team and was like, ‘Hey, just so you know, like, you should be on high alert… We thought that there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election. We have it on notice that, basically, there’s about to be some kind of dump of that’s similar to that. So just be vigilant,” Zuckerberg told Rogan.
As a reminder, Hunter Biden abandoned his laptop at a Wilmington, Delaware repair shop on April 12, 2019. The owner, John Paul Mac Isaac, walked into the Albuquerque FBI office, where he explained what he had, but was rebuffed by the FBI. He was told basically, get lost. This was mid-September 2019.
Two months passed and then, out of the blue, the FBI contacted John Paul Mac Issac. Two FBI agents from the Wilmington FBI office–Joshua Williams and Mike Dzielak–came to John Paul’s business. He offered immediately to give them the hard drive, no strings attached. Agents Williams and Dzielak declined to take the device.
Eight months later, Isaac provided a copy to then-President Donald Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who provided a copy of the hard drive to The Post.