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Home » “Two US officials” now saying Thibault wasn’t fired

“Two US officials” now saying Thibault wasn’t fired

The New Neo Posted on by

Word is that Thibault resigned because he was due to retire anyway.

So it doesn’t even seem to me as though he will be the designated fall guy.

Excerpt:

Timothy Thibault, a top-level FBI agent who had been under fire for his role in investigations regarding President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, resigned late last week and was walked out of the FBI, two U.S. officials confirmed. But these officials also said that Thibault had reached retirement age, and they added that all of those who retire hand over their badge and gun and are escorted out of the building.

That’s what the “two US officials” said. As for the FBI, it “declined to comment.”

Comments

“Two US officials” now saying Thibault wasn’t fired — 28 Comments

  1. Wait. “Reaching retirement age” is NOT the same thing as resigning. They are, in fact, completely different things. How many times have you ever heard a retiring co-worker referred to as “He’s resigning” or “She’s quitting?”

    There is, in fact, NOTHING in the story that stated Thibault retired or that his resignation was an expected or anticipated thing.

    This is the worst sort of spin and anonymous-sourced nonsense we see in the media. It doesn’t actually refute ANYTHING of the initial story but merely implies that it was incorrect or inaccurate. And plenty of sheep will accept it without thinking. Gah!

    Mike

  2. When I retired from a manufacturing facility, I was escorted out, since I had to give up my badge, so that is pretty standard procedure.

    But if they were trying to create a narrative that the agency is cracking down on rogue agents, this destroys that notion.

    Could have been a choice— resign or be fired, your choice.

  3. Well, who would clean house? Wray? And why would they?
    And settle for this and not others like the guy that framed the Whitmer defendants and then Swatted Trump?

  7. Updates and some analysis on the Mar-a-lago raid by J. E. Dyer.

    https://theoptimisticconservative.wordpress.com/2022/08/24/toc-ready-room-24-august-2022-notes-on-the-boxes-of-mar-a-lago-the-end-of-an-old-order-continues/
    Most is similar to what all the pundits are saying about classification and what the documents MIGHT be, because no one actually knows.
    However, she raises some points I haven’t seen elsewhere to date:

    Two: it’s interesting to note that the scenario being developed for us depends on Trump being in the habit of making off with hard-copy classified documents. We’re told that he tore things out of intelligence briefings and took them to the residence.

    That sounds off-hand like Trump removing things from the President’s Daily Brief (PDB), which is the product that encompasses multiple topics and comes in the door on a regular basis. (It’s collated at ODNI and largely populated and organized by the CIA.)

    But we supposedly had remarkably pertinent information on that very topic during Trump’s term. It was reported a number of times that he had no patience for reading the PDB, and preferred to engage with his briefers verbally.
    …
    The same implication would apply to any of his hard-copy briefing material; i.e., single-topic material providing background. The WaPo report hints at that.

    This does leave us to wonder what, exactly, was in those boxes at Mar-a-Lago. It doesn’t sound like things he would have torn out from briefings. If he was really interested in hard copy, it’s more likely to have been linked to, say, Russiagate and Spygate.

    Squaring the classification of the material – including TS/SCI and SAP – with things that would interest Trump because they related to “Crossfire Hurricane” (Russiagate, Spygate) isn’t necessarily a simple matter either. Perhaps some of the materials are the ones declassified by Trump and relating to the -Gates, and others weren’t.

    One thing is for sure. If Trump was tearing things out of the PDB, ODNI and CIA at a minimum would have copies of everything. It’s a good bet that nothing Trump “tore pages” from is actually “missing,” or ever was.

    Three: there was a little side-story about the Zelensky phone call in 2019 that may be pertinent to all this. It flared up briefly and then died down because it was so stupid. I wrote about it at the time because of its stupidity (while getting outsized attention), and its need to have the bracing ice-water of reality thrown over it.

    The story seemed to trace to Alexander Vindman, and briefly was this: he, or someone, was alarmed that Trump’s office was overclassifying the information from the interaction with Zelensky. The alarmists were worried that Trump was misusing classification to try to keep information from being accessible to the staffers who, in the alarmists’ view, should normally have such access.

    Now, that’s not their call to make and there was no whistle to legitimately blow on it. But moving on from that: the complaint made it pretty clear that information about contacts with Zelensky was being protected behind a compartmented system firewall the aggrieved staffers couldn’t access.

    The first reaction to this information about Trump’s office would be that he was determined to keep NSC staffers from leaking the material, as so often happened, in a manner designed to sabotage Trump’s policies. (A report from Politico tending to corroborate that point emerged shortly thereafter.)

    I recall thinking at the time that it sounded as if the Trump front office had created a SAP [Special Access Program] to protect information from chronic leakers inside the NSC.

    And in hindsight, that doesn’t seem off the wall. POTUS can create as many SAPs as he wants, whenever he wants. It’s up to him. There’s nothing that could limit his use of that classification option to protect information. The only opinions on it can be political ones about his motives; there’s no basis in law or regulation to impugn him for using SAPs.
    …
    It would also explain a lot if some of the “SAP” material that went to Mar-a-Lago was “sensitive” not for U.S. national security, but for the agencies trying to sabotage Trump from inside his government, and even for Joe Biden and his family, and their foreign dealings.

    The “SAP” connection just outlined wouldn’t apply to the formal Crossfire Hurricane records, at least not directly. Those CH records would have been generated by the FBI: the work product of federal agencies, maintained and classified under existing agency rules.

    I also doubt, as mentioned in earlier posts, that there was much if anything classified TS/SCI that was related to Crossfire Hurricane per se.
    There could, however, be CH files in the mix – whether they were removed in January or seized on 8 August – that were classified at lower levels than TS/SCI or using SAPs.

    There remains a great deal to unpack about all this. Based on the statements of government agencies, we know too little to be sure what kinds of materials were in the boxes at Mar-a-Lago. As Byran Dean Wright says, it would be nice if we could trust the agencies (i.e., DOJ, FBI) to tell us the honest truth – but we can’t. We manifestly cannot trust the Biden Oval Office to tell us the truth. It lied through its teeth in its first statement about the 8 August raid on Mar-a-Lago. Nor can we trust the mainstream media.

    The picture that continues to emerge is this one. Whatever is in those boxes, somebody really, really wanted to get it out of Mar-a-Lago and away from Trump.

    …

    Right after the 8 August raid, we noted that America’s foreign adversaries responded by doing unprecedented things – things they wouldn’t have done if they had thought there was still a shred of the old America still at the helm in the White House.

    This section of the Ready Room offers a few observations readers may not have seen elsewhere. Seemingly small developments demonstrate that Putin, for example, isn’t paralyzed by the “quagmire” in Ukraine, while NATO, if not paralyzed, is too complacent about it.
    [comments on international activities]
    …
    It’s always some damnfool thing in the Balkans.
    …
    Finland and Estonia are going to integrate coastal defense forces in the Eastern Baltic, basically to rig a trap for the Russian Baltic Fleet parked at the dead end of the Gulf of Finland.
    …
    The threat of the entire Baltic being treated by NATO as an “internal sea” is obvious enough from the map, and at most should be a tacit threat to Russia whose potential would be realized as a last resort, if Russia keeps showing worse tendencies. “Baltic as internal sea” should be a bargaining point, not a stated aspiration of NATO members.

    Russia, with no warm-water ports affording direct access to the open oceans, is uniquely sensitive to maritime encirclement. It really isn’t necessary or desirable to carelessly frame public comments as if that’s what NATO wants. It’s inevitably destabilizing. Russia can’t possibly live with it.

    Security for NATO nations on Russia’s perimeter is perfectly consonant with fair, free access for Russia to the open oceans, as long as both sides are acting in good faith. That’s what NATO diplomacy should always, always emphasize.

    We used to have statesman-leaders who knew these things, and the leadership chops to advise our allies on them.
    …
    Another tweet thread unfolds the recent events in Mali, in Northwestern Africa, which have seen France pull troops out and Russia bring mercenaries, troops, and military aircraft in.

    And so on.

  8. Second Raid post by Dyer.

    https://theoptimisticconservative.wordpress.com/2022/08/28/mar-a-lago-affidavit-russiagate-rides-again/

    The affidavit behind the warrant for the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago is out, sort of, and it appears to fulfill expectations. The statute citations are absurd, the prior cooperation of former President Trump with federal agencies is clear, a huge question remains unanswered, and the issue of declassification is dealt with in a series of rimshots that never land in a pocket (which alone should have been a red flag to magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart).

    And that’s just the part we can see. The real question – not really a question, I think – is what’s invisible behind the massive redactions.

    I say it’s not really a question, because one thing it has to be is excuses for the statute citations, which include language implying Trump is suspected of conspiring to hand sensitive national defense material to unauthorized persons, and has unknown confederates in such an enterprise.

    That this is mind-bogglingly ridiculous ought to be evident. But for those with an impenetrable hatred of Trump, a pertinent point is that, if Trump has been under investigation for such suspicions, finding material marked classified at Mar-a-Lago is just about the last form of evidence that would ring bells or constitute a smoking gun.

    …
    The question, which I‘ve posed many times now, is why – if an FBI agent is certain that documents containing “national defense information” were being improperly and dangerously stored at Mar-a-Lago – the material wasn’t seized during the FBI visit in June 2022.
    …
    Regarding the huge question about not seizing the files in June, that’s another thing we could expect to be excused in the redacted portions. It’s hard to imagine a judge not asking why the files weren’t simply seized in June, if it was so dangerous for them to remain at Mar-a-Lago with Trump doing who knows what with them.

    Two additional points for now.

    One, the redactions give us just enough to impugn Trump – for those so inclined – with intimations of potential espionage. But they don’t give us any basis for evaluating what is essentially innuendo to that effect. That’s what the redaction process was for: to leave drive-by impressions we can’t judge against a full analysis of the facts.

    If the FBI had anything to indicate Trump was engaged in espionage, we’d already know it. The FBI didn’t need those Mar-a-Lago documents to build such a case.
    …
    The other point is more esoteric, and more interesting. I won’t go into it in depth, but it’s salient because of the ambiguity about “classified information” that it allows DOJ to make use of.

    The clue to it is found in Footnote 2 on page 22 of the affidavit. We can’t see what that footnote relates to in the base text, because the whole passage is redacted. But the footnote is enough to preview the Swiss cheese nature of criminal adjudications on “classified information,” as the issue would have to be treated in any case brought against a former president.
    …
    First the footnote says: “18 U.S.C. § 793(e) [a paragraph of the Espionage Act, cited in the affidavit] does not use the term ‘classified information,’ but rather criminalizes the unlawful retention of ‘information relating to the national defense.’”

    So right away, it’s clear why the FBI special agent lodging the affidavit was at pains to state on pp. 2-3 (paragraphs 3 and 4) that in his judgment, the documents with classification markings contained “national defense information” (NDI).

    The short answer to that point is, “Thank you for your input, Special Agent. Let us know when you get elected president.”

    There’s a good reason for that short answer. The footnote then lets fly: “The statute does not define ‘information related to the national defense’ but courts have construed it broadly.”

    There’s the rub. First, the Espionage Act doesn’t define “information related to the national defense.” Therefore, a special agent with expertise in NDI can’t have attained his expertise by using criteria for NDI in the Espionage Act. There aren’t any.

    Meanwhile, defining “information related to the national defense,” as it pertains to classification of documents and other record material, is a policy area under the authority of the POTUS.
    …
    Moreover, determining the level of damage to national security is, and has always been, inherently an authority of the president, due to his constitutionally-defined duties. If Congress wants to weigh in on a related topic, it can do so as it does with any other foreign or security policy topic – with varying degrees of effectiveness. But the incumbent POTUS’s authority to make such judgments at all times overrides the opinions of his subordinates.

    …
    This discussion should help illuminate how the affidavit skirts the issue of what POTUS has the authority to do, and fudges the relationship of that issue to investigating Trump under the Espionage Act. It’s a little bait and switch: talk about classification markings, but then slip in the reference to NDI, and elide the two as if they naturally go together.

    It’s a major problem created by the Espionage Act that they don’t go together. The meaning of the POTUS’s authority has never been in doubt: if he declassifies something, it’s not for an FBI special agent to come along afterward and say, “But that’s national defense information so the POTUS’s handling of it is a danger to America.”
    …
    As Lee Smith, author of The Plot Against the President, observed in a tweet on Saturday, the profile of the operation that’s emerging is classic Russiagate.
    …
    The timing continues to point at Trump’s RICO lawsuit, suggesting a fishing expedition as a preemptive move.

    The basic dynamic – Trump may have damaging material to bring to bear, so Trump will be targeted and kneecapped with a fresh round of accusations – is also the same as with the impeachments and rig-fortifying of 2020. The minute it looked like Trump might have some of the reams of damaging information on Hunter Biden, in mid-2019, the process kicked off of tying Impeachment I to accusations about collusion against the Bidens, and of flogging a media theme throughout 2020 that Trump may be cooperating with Russia in anti-Biden disinformation.

    The entire time Impeachment I and the 2020 “collusion” theme were in progress, the FBI knew of, and then had in hand, the Hunter Biden laptop. We know now that the FBI not only suppressed its information throughout the campaign, but warned Facebook in effect that the New York Post’s reporting on the laptop could likely be Russian disinformation – which caused Facebook to rigorously censor it.
    …
    But so it goes, as Joe Friday used to say, in the repetitive scenarios of Russiagate. Daniel Greenfield had a prescient op-ed at Israel National News on 27 August [LINK], in which he predicted this: “There’s never going to be a trial [of Trump] because those require evidence. … there can’t be an actual trial. There will only be the perpetual investigation. Interlocking teams of Democrats at the federal and state levels will generate and juggle investigations.”

    And his closing argument begins as follows: “[T]he investigations are now permanent. They begin before a candidate even runs, follow him through his time in office, and hound him after he leaves. Trump was the first target of the permanent investigation. He won’t be the last. The permanent investigation is government opposition research. It interlocks directly with political campaigns, whether those of Hillary or Biden, and feeds material back and forth between government investigators and campaign hacks. It takes out their allies and aides to weaken them.”

    Greenfield’s post is worth a read, as always.

  9. If he was the only one not 1 of the %99, probably to look like cleaning house yet not really.
    So escort thousands more, it would be just a start.

  10. We need 10 year term limits of all gov’t employees, including FBI CIA NSA – so those folks leave and go out of gov’t, and new folk come in.

    If there is more fire under Wray, Thibault will become a key scapegoat – but so far it’s mostly just more wimpy words.

  11. Walking out a quitting of retiring employee is pretty standard. It is also pretty common to tell a problem employee he either retires (if that is possible) or he will be fired. Retirement stops all kinds of litigation.

  12. We need 10 year term limits of all gov’t employees, including FBI CIA NSA – so those folks leave and go out of gov’t, and new folk come in.

    Disagree. Rotation-in-office might be a satisfactory policy in re occupations which have well populated private sectors (e.g. law). And, of course, it is satisfactory policy in re elected officials (judges excepted) and senior executives. IMO, it’s more important that (1) hiring and promotion be regulated with rigorous examinations, not gutted examinations to please Democratic pols in the judiciary and (2) that something approaching at will employment be the order of the day. It’s important that people in the civil service be hired and promoted according to impersonal processes. It does not benefit the commonweal to give them a property right to their jobs. Have a system of post-termination reviews where the erstwhile employee can present evidence he was fired for an impermissible reason (e.g. for whistleblowing, availing himself of due benefits, exercising his civil rights on his off hours), with remedies in the form of indemnities and proceedings contra those signing the letter of termination.

    Another set of problems we ought to address would be excessive and opaque compensation, actuarially unsound benefit programs, and overstaffing of offices.

    Another reform: require salaried line employees in agencies devoted to intramural oversight be at least 55 years of age and pledged to spend the rest of their work life until retirement in the oversight apparat. These inspectors and auditors undertaking internal investigations must not be people who might have a conflict of interest derived from aspirations to re-enter the regular apparat.

  13. I think he can still be the designated fall guy. It just won’t be very satisfying to Trump supporters, but Wray will be happy to say, “we dealt with the problem”. It is not different than the way they treated Hillary’s email. Hillary’s side still claim Comey stole the election from her, when he really kept her out of prison. Now the FBI hasn’t gotten rid of a problem agent, while really sending him his monthly retirement check while he works a few talkingheads gig on MSNBC and elsewhere. The whole “retain your records and clear your calendar” hubbub will be over.

  14. Lots of speculation on what is in those boxes. FBI implies serious nature of contents. Anyone else remember the FBI carrying out boxes of “evidence” from Richard Jewels’ house? Same speculation and same implication of serous nature. How’d that turn out?

  15. To clarify Miguel cervantes post above (August 30, 2022 at 9:43 pm)

    Thibault’s pro bono mouthpiece put out a statement that claims he retired and wasn’t fired. So maybe those ‘two officials’ just told the other reporter that people who retire are escorted out, and we’re supposed to assume that applies to Thibault’s situation.

    https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2022/08/the-thibault-statement.php (has a graphic of the tweet from the CBS reporter of Thibault’s statement)

  18. Imagine being so stupid as to actually believe anything in the NY Times or Wash Post sourced to anonymous officials.

    It only took two lies for the boy who cried wolf to lose all credibility. How many thousands of lies will it take for the mainstream media liars?

  19. The raid can only be justified by an emergency of the most exigent nature in order to stop an extraordinary crime involving very serious national security concerns that could not be stopped any other way.

    FBI and DOJ raid failed on all three factors and we already have enough information to conclude that.

  20. I still wonder why Trump is so hated by Democrats and their government employees. Some had to be the defeat of sainted Hillary. Some of this was done to W Bush after he defeated Gore in 2000. The Democrats still held the Senate at the time and delayed confirming any of Bush’s appointments. This left a lot of Clinton appointments in place until 9/11. As I recall, Rumsfeld had one Senate confirmed appointee in place at 9/11. The war on Trump may be partly because he is unbribable. He doesn’t need the favors offered to most politicians. That’s partly why I am concerned about DeSantis.

    The Trump hatred seems to be an example of mass psychosis. A sort of tulip mania by half the population.

  21. Mike K,

    Because he is effective. His policies helped us become energy independent through oil, natural gas and coal AND we reduced carbon emissions. His policies improved employment among minorities and reduced crime in inner cities.

    If they allow his policies to continue, it will become irrefutable that canards like climate change and systemic racism are scams; stalking horses used to foster an agenda anathema to freedom and capitalism.

    If the tin man, the lion and the scarecrow figure out they don’t need the great and powerful Oz, Oz loses his greatness and power and has to work for a living, like a normal schlub.

  24. Is there a difference in legal resources to defend Thibault available from his employer or former employer in one of two categories; formally and normally retired; fired?
    If he were going to be fired but was instead told to retire, he might have more help if tried or run past a GOP congress. That would reduce the pressure to come clean.
    Jeez, I’m a conspiratorialist. Wonder how that happened?

  25. I mentioned the firm he retained, the ones who probably wouldn’t stand for the 2nd amendment, but would gladly defend terrorist, the senior partners served 18 years as the American taliban,

  26. I have it on good authority that he left to spend more time with his family, and to pursue other interests.

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