The senior Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee is demanding that the Justice Department and the FBI investigate the bureau’s top agent in Washington, D.C., over his social-media posts, which are highly partisan — I know, I know, you’ll never guess for which side!
Tim Thibault runs the FBI’s Washington field office which, naturally, handles many of federal law enforcement’s most politically charged investigations. He’s been at the FBI for a quarter-century, is a longtime supervisory agent, and also held top counterterrorism posts.
Turns out, agent Thibault has a very active, highly political presence on LinkedIn, among other platforms. And no, to scrutinize that presence is not to deny that police officials are American citizens who, like everyone else, are entitled to have and to express political views. To attract people to his social-media accounts, Thibault appears to be brandishing his FBI credentials, with the implication that his status and experience give him special insight into the subjects of his dingbattery.
There are about a million regulations that prohibit FBI agents from engaging in political commentary that could undermine public confidence that the FBI is a non-partisan, apolitical investigative agency. Agents are strictly forbidden from exploiting their status as FBI officials to promote their political, commercial, and other private-sphere activities. And unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past seven years, you may have heard that the bureau has been laboring under the weight of an enormous scandal, stemming from the political biases of FBI leadership and investigators, and the manner in which those biases influenced the conduct and public perception of the agency’s most consequential investigations.
As the Washington Examiner’s Jerry Dunleavy reports, Thibault’s public commentary takes aim at Republicans, the Trump administration, the Justice Department under then-attorney general Bill Barr, the American South, and the Catholic Church, among others. And upon perusing the trenchant observations in his oeuvre — e.g., “Can we give Kentucky to the Russian Federation?” — you can’t help but come away asking, “Who better to supervise and train junior investigators?”
Senator Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) has written to Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI director Chris Wray, demanding both an inquiry and production of information about cases that Thibault has investigated and supervised. Senator Grassley is also asking the DOJ inspector-general Michael Horowitz to look into the matter. Recall that IG Horowitz has conducted several recent investigations into the FBI’s political bias, mishandling of politically charged cases, and abuse of its FISA surveillance authorities (see, e.g., here, here, here, here, and here).
As echoed by our editorial today on the Michael Sussmann acquittal, it is disheartening to watch, day after day, how infection by partisan politics has degraded a great American institution.