A top FBI official who came under fire from Republicans over whistleblower complaints, including claims about the investigation into Hunter Biden, and his anti-Trump social media posts has retired from the bureau, his legal counsel confirmed on Tuesday.
Timothy Thibault, the FBI assistant special agent in charge of the Washington Field Office, “was not fired, not forced to retire, and not asked to retire,” lawyers representing him from Morrison & Foerster LLP said in a statement shared on Twitter by CBS News’s Catherine Herridge.
Thibault’s lawyers strongly rejected early reporting on Thibault’s departure from the FBI that suggested he was forced out and was seen being escorted out of the bureau’s headquarters on Friday.
“On his last day, as part of his processing, Mr. Thibault turned in his security badge and walked with two long-time special agent friends through the field office to finish processing his paperwork. He walked out of the building by himself. Claims to the contrary are false,” the statement from Thibault’s counsel said.
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Further, Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz announced this summer that Thibault may have violated the Hatch Act over his social media posts, including those criticizing Trump and then-Attorney General William Barr in 2020. To this, Thibault’s lawyers asserted that “those allegations are being investigated by the Office of Special Counsel” and that their client “is cooperating with that investigation, urges the Office to complete its review, and expects to be fully exonerated.”
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) demanded in May that the leaders of the DOJ and the FBI investigate whether the official violated DOJ guidelines through partisan posts on social media. Thibault had “liked” a LinkedIn post of a Washington Post opinion piece in February 2020 titled “The Justice Department confirms things are even worse than we feared,” according to the senator. The column repeatedly critiqued Barr’s tenure at the DOJ.
The senator pointed out that Thibault also liked another Washington Post column in September 2020, this one titled “William Barr has gone rogue.” The article criticized Barr’s handling of the cases against retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn and Trump associate Roger Stone. Grassley showed that Thibault directly posted on his LinkedIn another Washington Post piece in September 2020 titled “Why the Michael Flynn case still matters.” Grassley also said he had found the FBI official’s Twitter account and pointed out that Thibault retweeted an anti-Trump Lincoln Project tweet that said, “Donald Trump is a psychologically broken, embittered, and deeply unhappy man.” The article by the Atlantic, which the Lincoln Project was sharing, was itself titled “Donald Trump is a Broken Man.”
Thibault had also been the subject of whistleblower complaints to Republicans, raising concerns of political bias in the upper echelons of the bureau, but the statement from his legal team insisted he did nothing wrong.
One whistleblower who reached out to Grassley claimed the agent “ordered closed” an “avenue of additional derogatory Hunter Biden reporting” even though “all of the reporting was either verified or verifiable via criminal search warrants.” Grassley’s office also divulged that Thibault relied heavily on a “left-aligned organization” when seeking approval to open an investigation into former President Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign.
“Mr. Thibault’s blatant partisanship undermined the work and reputation of the FBI. 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,” Grassley said in a statement obtained by the Washington Examiner. “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.”
When FBI Director Christopher Wray testified before Congress this month, he said he found it “deeply troubling” when he read the recent whistleblower allegations.
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Federal prosecutors are weighing charges against Biden, who is President Joe Biden’s son, for alleged tax violations and for making a false statement in connection to the purchase of a firearm at a time when he should have been blocked from obtaining such a weapon because of a drug addiction. A report from CNN in July on the latest deliberations said the federal investigation had reached a “critical juncture.” The younger Biden has denied wrongdoing.
The statement from Thibault’s counsel addressed allegations of certain actions in investigations for partisan reasons, saying he “welcomes any investigation of these false allegations, regardless of his retirement. He firmly believes that any investigation will conclude that his supervision, leadership and decision making were not impacted by political bias or partisanship of any kind. He is confident that all of his decisions were consistent with the FBI’s highest standards for ethics and integrity.”
They said Thibault had no involvement in the planning or execution of the recent FBI search for documents at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida and denied that he supervised the investigation into Hunter Biden, noting Wray confirmed on Aug. 4 that it was being handled by the Baltimore Field Office. “In particular, Mr. Thibault was not involved in any decision related to any laptop that may be at issue in that investigation, and he did not seek to close the investigation,” they added.
One allegation not mentioned in the statement was Thibault’s alleged role in pressuring agents to “reclassify cases as ‘domestic violent extremism’ even if the cases do not meet the criteria for such a classification,” according to a whistleblower complaint received by House Judiciary Committee Republicans. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), the ranking member of the panel, confirmed to Breitbart that Thibault was a subject of that complaint and that the effort was meant to pad domestic terrorism statistics.
The Washington Examiner reached out to the FBI for comment.
