A top FBI official at the center of allegations by whistleblowers of political bias in the bureau against former President Donald Trump has apparently resigned under pressure after a report he was escorted out of his office by “headquarters-looking types” last week.
Timothy Thibualt, now the former assistant special agent in charge of the Washington field office, had come under fire after he allegedly interfered with an assessment of the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, according to whistleblower reports.
Thibault was deeply involved in the FBI’s investigation into Hunter Biden, according to reports.
His abrupt resignation was reported Monday by The Washington Times.
In addition, a separate whistleblower report said Thibault obtained approval to open an investigation into former President Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign from FBI Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland while concealing the political bias behind the information he used to obtain it.
According to Just the News, Iowa GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley’s office said whistleblowers alleged Thibault withheld the fact his evidence was derived in “substantial part” from information from a “left-aligned organization.”
The Washington Times reported that Thibault “was forced to leave his post,” according to “two former FBI officials familiar with the situation.”
“Mr. Thibault was seen exiting the bureau’s elevator on Friday,” the Times reported.
“He was escorted by two or three ‘headquarters-looking types,’ according to eyewitness accounts provided to one of the former officials.”
Should anti-Trump FBI officials be investigated?
The Times noted that “[t]he 25-year FBI veteran was on leave for at least a month over revelations about political statements he made while leading the public corruption unit.”
These statements included a series of social media diatribes and expressed support for what Grassley’s office described as “highly partisan” articles on LinkedIn.
According to the Times, these included two separate 2020 Washington Post pieces calling on then-Attorney General William Barr to aggressively prosecute those in Trump’s inner circle. He also retweeted a post from the rabidly anti-Trump pseudo-conservative group the Lincoln Project, because of course he did.
Grassley wrote to the Justice Department’s inspector general in May to request an investigation into Thibault for violating rules designed to keep political bias out of FBI investigations.
In testimony before Congress earlier this month, according to the New York Post, FBI Director Christopher Wray said Thibault’s social media activity was “deeply troubling” but insisted it was “not representative of the FBI.”
In an Aug. 1 statement on the Senate floor, Grassley — the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee — also said additional sources had come forward to accuse Thibault of blocking a thorough analysis of Hunter Biden’s toxic MacBook.
“Whistleblowers have told my office that the FBI maintains many sources that have provided extensive information on Hunter Biden,” Grassley said.
“That information allegedly involves potential criminal activity such as money laundering. According to allegations, the underlying information was verified and verifiable. However, instead of green-lighting investigative activity, the FBI shut it down.”
Neither the FBI nor Thibault have commented on the agent’s departure from the organization.
However, if the FBI thought that Thibault’s rather forceful departure from the bureau would sate Republican voices looking for answers regarding the agency’s political bias in matters Trump-related, they were sorely mistaken.
“Mr. Thibault’s blatant partisanship undermined the work and reputation of the FBI,” Sen. Grassley said in a statement to the Times.
“This type of bias in high-profile investigations casts a shadow over all of the bureau’s work that he was involved in, which ranged from opening an investigation into Trump based on liberal news articles to shutting down investigative activity into Hunter Biden that was based on verified information.”
“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 added.
Indeed, the need for an investigation is more urgent than ever. Thibault is only one part of the rotten apparatus conservatives have taken to calling “the swamp” or the “deep state.”
The former president who helped popularize those terms, after all, just had his estate raided, purportedly over classified documents being improperly stored.
Which is funny, considering no FBI raid was ever conducted at Hillary Clinton’s home in Chappaqua, New York, where she had a server filled with oodles of classified documents she accumulated during her time as secretary of state.
In 2016, when she was the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, the FBI’s then-director practically tripped over himself to assure America she wouldn’t be charged.
Yet, when more of her official State Department emails were found on a computer used by Clinton aide Huma Abedin as part of a separate investigation — you may remember that Abedin’s ex-partner, former Rep. Anthony Weiner, got busted for sexting with an underage girl on the selfsame computer that contained those documents — Democrats wailed with anger that James Comey publicly announced they were investigating those emails in the final days of the campaign.
Comey cost Hillary the election! they cried. It’s his fault! He gave us Trump! The FBI is complicit!
As we’ve learned in the interim, the FBI is hardly a covert hive of pro-Trump sentiment.
Consider the anti-Trump jihad Comey has been on for the past half-decade; this is a man who once said the most salacious and unproven detail of the debunked Steele dossier — the so-called “pee tape” — may really exist.
Or consider Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Timothy Thibault, or a whole legion of people whose names we don’t know but whose actions we’ve become all-too-familiar with.
However, the same people who thought the FBI was in the tank for Donald Trump for daring to investigate Hillary Clinton’s illegal email server are now perfectly fine with the bureau raiding the home of the former president of the United States, an unprecedented and politically charged move. They’re similarly fine with the fact an openly anti-Trump FBI official was blocking a serious analysis of Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Sure, it’s great that Thibault was escorted out of the bureau by “headquarters-looking types.” It’d be even better if some of those types escorted him up to Capitol Hill.
