A senior FBI agent resigned after months of fire from whistleblowers and Republicans accusing him of partisan meddling in the Hunter Biden laptop investigation.
Timothy Thibault, an assistant special agent in charge in the District of Columbia, was allegedly forced out of his job at the bureau over the weekend because of his partisan political behavior, according to CBS News.
Thibault pushed back this week through lawyers, saying in a statement to CBS that he was not fired nor asked to retire, and that he “informed his supervisors about a month ago that he intended to retire.” Thibault was seen exiting the agency on Friday.
Thibault, a 25-year-veteran of the agency, was accused by whistleblowers of thwarting the investigation into Hunter Biden’s laptop, after it surfaced at a Delaware computer repair shop in 2020. At the time, Democrats and members of the intelligence community claimed the laptop was part of a Russian disinformation campaign. It was later verified as Biden’s by several media outlets, but not until after the 2020 presidential election.
The FBI placed Thibault on leave in July, soon after Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, accused him of burying “verified and verifiable derogatory information on Hunter Biden,” in a letter sent to the agency.
Thibault was removed in early August from his role at the Washington Field Office overseeing highly-sensitive public corruption matters. In that post, he wielded decision-making authority on whether to open investigations into political figures and other high profile individuals, according to Grassley.
The senior senator from Iowa said in the letter that “highly credible whistleblowers’’ told him that Thibault shut down a 2020 investigation into whether information found on the laptop pointed toward criminal activity. The whistleblowers also claimed Thibault attempted to cover up his actions by “improperly marking the matter in FBI systems so that it could not be opened in the future,” Grassley said.
Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisc., said in a separate letter sent the day before Thibault resigned that whistleblowers have also approached him about “the FBI’s apparent corruption.”
Thibault denies wrongdoing and insists his “supervision, leadership and decision making were not impacted by political bias or partisanship of any kind.” Thibault’s lawyers also state that “he did not supervise the investigation of Hunter Biden” and was “not involved in any decisions related to any laptop.”
National media started reporting on Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop in the lead-up to the 2020 election. The laptop included emails detailing Biden’s business dealings overseas. Twitter prohibited users from posting and sharing news articles about the laptop in the months before the election.
Last Thursday, on the “Joe Rogan Experience” podcast, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said that the company suppressed distribution of the New York Post’s report on Hunter Biden’s laptop because of a vague warning from the FBI about possible “Russian propaganda” that could affect the 2020 presidential election.
“‘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,’” Zuckerberg claimed the FBI said.
Grassley has been writing to the FBI about Thibault for some time. The senator sent a letter in May requesting an inspector general investigation into Thibault over “apparent political bias on his social media channels.”
Thibault’s social media includes “likes” and postings of highly partisan content, including a retweet of a Lincoln Project tweet that states, “Donald Trump is a psychologically broken, embittered, and deeply unhappy man.”
Thibault confirmed his social media posts are being investigated by the FBI’s Office of Special Counsel for potential violations of the Hatch Act.
FBI Director Christopher Wray said earlier this month at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that the whistleblower allegations made against Thibault and others were “deeply troubling.”