During more than 25 years as an FBI agent, Timothy R. Thibault made big names while investigating public corruption, sending two Democratic congressmen to prison and overseeing sensitive inquiries into the Clinton Foundation and former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, another Democrat.
But now, as Republicans and allies of former President Donald J. Trump work to undermine federal investigations into the former president, they have trained their sights on the little-known Mr. Thibault, who played a role in opening the Justice Department’s criminal investigation into Mr. Trump’s efforts to reverse his 2020 election loss. In his casting, Mr. Thibault, who retired last year, is the face of prejudice and misconduct in the office.
Powerful Republican lawmakers, including Representative Jim Jordan and Senator Charles R. Grassley, demanded that Mr. Thibault testified before his committees. Citing an unnamed GOP official, the panel of Mr. Jordan in a press release last year denounced Mr. Thibault as “public enemy number 1”.
But his story is more complicated than Republicans have let on. As an investigator working on high-profile public corruption and international terrorism cases, he was well regarded, eventually rising to one of the highest positions in the bureau’s Washington field office and winning internal awards for his professionalism.
But in an environment where Republicans have been looking for evidence of an anti-conservative bias within the FBI, it opened the door to intense scrutiny of its record. Republicans have cited several social media posts, including one that appeared to align him with critics of Mr. Trump, and his handling of a series of cases that touched on Mr. Trump on election fraud and the wrongdoing of the Biden family.
A number of current and former FBI agents are siding with Republicans in an attempt to show bias within the bureau. Some have even joined the committee of Mr. Jordan, including two former counterintelligence agents.
Another former agent — who now works for a conservative think tank and tried to solicit information from a right-wing author with ties to a former White House strategist for Mr. Trump — appears to have filed complaints against Thibault that Mr. Grassley has caught
The scrutiny of Mr. Thibault has his roots in his management of a public corruption team that became embroiled in conflict, including the Hunter Biden investigation, another focus of the Republican investigation on Capitol Hill.
Mr. Thibault was thrust into the harsh spotlight of politics in May 2022, when Mr. Grassley released a letter addressed to the FBI accusing it of partisanship.
The letter outlined his social media activity, which included expressing support for articles critical of Attorney General William P. Barr and reposting an article in The Atlantic titled “Donald Trump Is a Broken Man.” Mr. Grassley also accused Mr. Thibault from an anti-Catholic Twitter post about pedophiles. (Mr. Thibault, responding to a Catholic priest who denounced abortion, wrote in his post: “Focus on the pedophiles.” Mr. Thibault’s friends say he was raised Catholic.)
Mr. Thibault, friends and former colleagues say, was a leading nonpartisan investigator, but they know he showed poor judgment on social media.
Thibault worked on many cases involving both sides, his former colleagues said. He was the lead agent who successfully investigated former Representative William J. Jefferson, a Democrat from New Orleans, and Jesse L. Jackson Jr., a former Democratic congressman from Illinois. Both were convicted.
Former colleagues have also repeatedly recognized his work. In 2006, Mr. Thibault received an annual award recognizing “professional excellence” and “outstanding character.” He also won the Attorney General’s Distinguished Service Award for his role in the case of Mr. Jefferson.
The lawyer of Mr. Thibault did not respond to emails seeking comment, but his lawyer’s office issued a statement last year after Republicans singled out Mr. Thibault.
“He strongly believes that any investigation will conclude that his supervision, leadership and decision-making were not affected by political bias or partisanship of any kind,” the statement said.
The Office of Special Counsel is investigating whether Mr. Thibault violate the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from engaging in political activities while on the job.
The FBI declined to comment. It was not possible to contact Mr. Thibault for comments.
After focusing on international terrorism from 2018 to 2020, Mr. Thibault returned as a top agent, handling criminal matters in the FBI’s Washington field office.
There he confronted three agents who were part of a public corruption team under his supervision at an FBI office in Manassas, northern Virginia. Even before the return of Mr. Thibault, members of the squad had been warned by their supervisor that because of previous disturbing comments by officers, partisanship was unacceptable.
Under Mr. Thibault, the team seems to have fractured over how to handle political cases.
In one case, he rejected a request to open an investigation into whether Italian satellites had been used to sway votes in favor of President Biden, a conspiracy theory that Mr. Trump peddled, two former law enforcement officials.
Trump’s Justice Department also believed the theory to be unfounded. When the White House pressed the department to investigate, acting Deputy Attorney General Richard P. Donoghue derided it as “sheer lunacy.”
Mr. Thibault was also linked to another incident that has caught the attention of Republicans.
Before the election, two agents contacted Peter Schweizer, who is the president of the Government Accountability Institute, which has received millions of dollars from prominent conservative donors. Mr. Schweizer also writes for Breitbart, a right-wing news outlet, and has ties to Stephen K. Bannon, a former White House strategist for Mr. trump
In an interview, Mr. Schweizer confirmed that the two sought information on Hunter Biden, the president’s son, whose foreign business dealings have been the subject of intense Republican scrutiny for years.
Mr. Schweizer had recently published a book, “Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite,” delving into the financial dealings of the Biden family. The agents, said Mr. Schweizer, they wanted to know if he could share documents related to Hunter Biden’s foreign business ties that he might have gathered for his work. Mr. Schweizer said he turned over the corporate records and other files.
After The New York Post reported on the younger Mr. Biden’s laptop in October 2020, Mr. Schweizer said he informed FBI agents that he had a copy of the contents of the laptop, which was circulating in right-wing circles. But although agents had expressed interest, Mr. Schweizer said they never followed up, and in the end, “I never sent them anything.”
The relationship “ended abruptly without any explanation,” he added.
The communication of the two agents with Mr. Schweizer caused tension among FBI officials in Delaware handling the case, who had seized the laptop in late 2019 through a grand jury subpoena, the former officials said.
At least one of the agents received instructions from Mr. Thibault to close this line of inquiry due to concerns that Mr. Thibault had received a secret briefing about the possibility that the laptop contained disinformation, one of the former law enforcement officials said.
In a press release, Mr. Grassley accused Mr. Thibault of ‘improper conduct’ in Hunter Biden investigation. Mr. Trump, meanwhile, lashed out on social media, claiming that Mr. Thibault had been involved in “hiding and suppressing from the public and the media” the “Laptop from Hell,” before the 2020 election.
In his May 2022 letter to the FBI, Mr. Grassley tied Mr. Thibault to Bruce Ohr, a former Justice Department official, and his wife, Nellie Ohr, who were portrayed by Trump supporters as pro-Democrat conspiracy theorists out to destroy Trump. The three attended a seminar abroad in February 2016. One of the former law enforcement officials said Mr. Thibault did not know the couple.
A person familiar with the matter said one of the agents involved in disclosing Mr. Schweizer, Thomas Olohan, had drafted a lengthy memorandum accusing Mr. Thibault of being biased against Mr. trump In the note, Mr. Olohan suggested that the fact that Mr. That Thibault and the Ohrs had attended the same seminar was evidence of partiality on the part of Mr. Thibault.
The men had clashed after Mr. Thibault found out that the daughter of Mr. Olohan, who reports for The daily signal, a news site run by the conservative Heritage Foundation, had been writing about someone her father was investigating, two former law enforcement officials said. After Mr. Thibault removed him from this case, Mr. Olohan moved to another crime squad before retiring last year.
Mr Trump and his allies have vigorously attacked the FBI’s reasons for opening the Russia probe, seeking to undermine its legitimacy.
And now Mr. Grassley has accused Mr. Thibault of opening an improper investigation into Mr. Trump and his campaign. Thibault wrote a memo last spring that launched the investigation into efforts to create voter lists committed to Mr. Trump in states he had lost in 2020, according to former law enforcement officials.
But in accordance with a policy established by the Department of Justice of Mr. Barr in the months leading up to the 2020 election, top FBI and Justice Department officials must sign off on the memo before investigating any candidate. The rule was intended to avoid influencing the outcome of the race.
Charlie Savage, Luke Broadwater and Jo Becker contributed reporting. Kitty Bennett contributed to the research.
