FBI agent Timothy Thibault resigned late last week and was walked out from the FBI, according to two US officials, after being criticized for his investigations into Hunter Biden, the son of President Biden. However, those officials also noted Thibault had reached retirement age, and they added that anyone retiring must surrender their badges and weapons and be escorted from the building.
After working at FBI’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., Thibault had recently been removed from his duties as assistant special agent in charge of the FBI’s Washington field office, which covers the entire District of Columbia and Northern Virginia. It had already been a month since Thibault had been on leave after the Senate Judiciary Committee’s top Republican, Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), became concerned about whistleblower allegations that the FBI had obstructed his own investigations.
A senior FBI agent in the bureau’s Washington field office shut down “a derogatory Hunter Biden reporting channel” in October 2020, a month before the election. Grassley has identified the agent as Thibault in an earlier letter. In a letter to Christopher Wray, director of FBI, in July, Grassley stated that Thibault and FBI’s supervising intelligence analyst, Brian Auten, were reportedly implicated in “a scheme” to “undermine derogatory information connected to Hunter Biden by falsely suggesting it was disinformation.”
“[T]he allegations provided to my office 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,” Grassley claimed. Along with his concerns about Hunter Biden’s investigation, Grassley also accused Thibault of probable violations of “[f]ederal laws, regulations and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) guidelines” in a May 31 letter, said NY Post.
“Whistleblowers have reported to me, that although the FBI and Justice Department maintain policies dictating specific standards requiring substantial factual predication to initiate an investigation, Thibault and other Justice Department and FBI employees failed to comply with these requirements,” he claimed.
Following a vague FBI warning about possible “Russian propaganda” in connection with the 2020 presidential election, Zuckerberg announced last week that Facebook had deleted the Post’s explosive investigation into Hunter Biden. “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,’” Zuckerberg said during the podcast “The Joe Rogan Experience”.
Zuckerberg said the FBI added, “‘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 that’s similar to that. So just be vigilant.’”
Furthermore, Senate Republicans have examined Thibault’s supposed anti-Trump social media activities leading up to the 2020 election, which included retweeting a Lincoln Project post calling Trump a “psychologically broken, embittered and deeply unhappy man.”
During a congressional hearing earlier this month, Wray was questioned about Timothy Thibault. He said the claims that Thibault “liked” social media posts critical of the associates of Trump were “troubling.”
In other news, Trump slammed the FBI after the raid on Mar-a-Lago.