Former Washington Field Office Special Agent in Charge Tim Thibault was reportedly escorted out of the Bureau's headquarters on Friday, amid whistleblower allegations that he showed political bias in his handling of politically sensitive investigations.

The Washington Times reported eyewitness accounts that "Mr. Thibault was seen exiting the bureau’s elevator last Friday escorted by two or three 'headquarters-looking types.'"

Whistleblowers alleged that Thibault concealed the partisan nature of evidence from FBI Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland to secure their approval to open an investigation into former President Donald Trump. That investigation culminated in the FBI's raid on Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate earlier this month.

The public release of the affidavit that accompanied the search warrant revealed the warrant application relied heavily on information from news articles, including a CBS Miami piece titled "Moving Trucks Spotted At Mar-a-Lago" and a Breitbart News article in which former Trump adviser Kash Patel discussed the classified status of documents the bureau previously removed from the estate on behalf of the National Archives.

Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley confirmed to Just the News prior to the raid that Thibault had been removed from his post and reassigned to an unspecified position.

A senior FBI official in the bureau’s Washington field office has abruptly resigned after coming under congressional scrutiny for suspected political bias in handling the investigation of Hunter Biden’s computer laptop.

The Washington Times learned that Timothy Thibault, an assistant special agent in charge, was forced to leave his post according to two former FBI officials familiar with the situation.

Mr. Thibault was seen exiting the bureau’s elevator last Friday escorted by two or three “headquarters-looking types,” according to eyewitness accounts provided to one of the former officials.

A top FBI agent at the Washington field office reportedly resigned from his post last week after facing intense scrutiny over allegations he helped shield Hunter Biden from criminal investigations into his laptop and business dealings.

Timothy Thibault, an FBI assistant special agent in charge, was allegedly forced out after he was accused of political bias in his handling of probes involving President Biden’s son, sources told the Washington Times on Monday.

The agent was escorted out of the field office by at least two “headquarters-looking types” last Friday, the sources said.

Thibault and the FBI didn’t immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment on Monday.

Thibault, a 25-year-veteran, had already been on leave for a month after the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), started raising concerns about whistleblower claims the FBI had obstructed its own investigations into the first son....

FBI Director Christopher Wray has lost the confidence of rank-and-file FBI agents after a senior bureau official left under a cloud of accusations that he shielded Hunter Biden’s laptop from a criminal probe — and some believe the top G-man should step down, a new report says.

“I’m hearing from [FBI personnel] that they feel like the director has lost control of the bureau,” Kurt Siuzdak, a lawyer representing FBI whistleblowers, told the Washington Times in a report published Tuesday. “They’re saying, ‘How does this guy survive? He’s leaving. He’s got to leave.’

“[The FBI agents] are telling me they have lost confidence in Wray. All Wray does is go in and say ‘We need more training and we’re doing stuff about it,’ or ‘We will not tolerate it,’” Siuzdak said.

His comments come in the wake of Timothy Thibault, the top agent in charge of the FBI field office in Washington, resigning amid claims he blocked investigations into the first son’s laptop. Thibault’s lawyer said his resignation was unrelated to these claims and that he did not seek to close the laptop investigation.

Thibault was escorted out of the field office last Friday by “headquarters-looking types,” the Washington Times reported, while U.S. officials said this is common practice for anyone who retires.

Siuzdak told The Post that he left the bureau in March after a 25-year career, because management failed to hold bosses accountable, a problem that stems from politicization at the highest levels of the agency.

He told the Times that the whistleblowers have alleged that Wray, who was appointed by President Donald Trump in 2017, did not take action when confronted with issues inside the bureau that ranged from agents being forced to sign false affidavits to sexual harassment claims.

The FBI, which has been taking heat for the Aug. 8 raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in search of classified documents, emphasized the integrity of its agents in a statement to the Times.

“The men and women of the FBI work hard every day to protect the American people and uphold the Constitution. All employees are held to the highest standards of professional and ethical conduct, and we expect them to focus on process, rigor, and objectivity in performance of their duties,” the statement said.

“Allegations of misconduct are taken seriously and referred to the Inspection Division or appropriate investigative body,” it said.

Wray, at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing earlier this month, called allegations that Thibault blocked an investigation into Hunter Biden’s laptop “deeply disturbing.”

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the ranking Republican on the panel, wrote to Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland in July to raise accusations from whistleblowers that the agency is burying “verified and verifiable” information about President Biden’s son by incorrectly labeling it as “misinformation.”

The Iowa senator said in his missive that if the accusations are true, the FBI and the Justice Department are “institutionally corrupted to their very core.”

It gives me no joy to write this piece.

Even a cursory review of the redacted version of the affidavit submitted in support of the government’s application for a search warrant at the home of former President Donald Trump reveals that he will soon be indicted by a federal grand jury for three crimes: Removing and concealing national defense information (NDI), giving NDI to those not legally entitled to possess it, and obstruction of justice by failing to return NDI to those who are legally entitled to retrieve it.

When he learned from a phone call that thirty FBI agents were at the front door of his Florida residence with a search warrant and he decided to reveal this publicly, Trump assumed that the agents were looking for classified top-secret materials that they’d allege he criminally possessed. His assumptions were apparently based on his gut instinct and not on a sophisticated analysis of the law. Hence, his public boast that he declassified all the formerly classified documents he took with him.

Unbeknownst to him, the feds had anticipated such a defense and are not preparing to indict him for possessing classified materials, even though he did possess hundreds of voluntarily surrendered materials marked “top secret.” It is irrelevant if the documents were declassified, as the feds will charge crimes that do not require proof of classification. They told the federal judge who signed the search warrant that Trump still had NDI in his home. It appears they were correct.

Under the law, it doesn’t matter if the documents on which NDI is contained are classified or not, as it is simply and always criminal to have NDI in a nonfederal facility, to have those without security clearances move it from one place to another, and to keep it from the feds when they are seeking it. Stated differently, the absence of classification—for whatever reason—is not a defense to the charges that are likely to be filed against Trump.

Yet, misreading and underestimating the feds, Trump actually did them a favor. One of the elements that they must prove for any of the three crimes is that Trump knew that he had the documents. The favor he did was admitting to that when he boasted that they were no longer classified. He committed a mortal sin in the criminal defense world by denying something for which he had not been accused.

The second element that the feds must prove is that the documents actually do contain national defense information. And the third element they must prove is that Trump put these documents into the hands of those not authorized to hold them and stored them in a non–federally secured place. Intelligence community experts have already examined the documents taken from Trump’s home and are prepared to tell a jury that they contain the names of foreign agents secretly working for the US. This is the crown jewel of government secrets. Moreover, Trump’s Florida home is not a secure federal facility designated for the deposit of NDI.

The newest aspect of the case against Trump that we learned from the redacted affidavit is the obstruction allegation. This is not the obstruction that Robert Mueller claimed he found Trump committed during the Russia investigation. This is a newer obstruction statute, signed by President George W. Bush in 2002, that places far fewer burdens on the feds to prove. The older statute is the one Mueller alleged. It characterizes any material interference with a judicial function as criminal. Thus, one who lies to a grand jury or prevents a witness from testifying commits this variant of obstruction.

But the Bush-era statute, the one the feds contemplate charging Trump with having violated, makes it a crime of obstruction by failing to return government property or by sending the FBI on a wild goose chase looking for something that belongs to the government and that you know that you have. This statute does not require the preexistence of a judicial proceeding. It only requires that the defendant has the government’s property, knows that he has it and baselessly resists efforts by the government to get it back.

Where does all this leave Trump? The short answer is: in hot water. The longer answer is: He is confronting yet again the federal law enforcement and intelligence communities for which he has rightly expressed such public disdain. He had valid points of expression during the Russia investigation. He has little ground upon which to stand today.

I have often argued that many of these statutes that the feds have enacted to protect themselves are morally unjust and not grounded in the Constitution. One of my intellectual heroes, the great Murray Rothbard, taught that the government protects itself far more aggressively than it protects our natural rights.

In a monumental irony, both Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks journalist who exposed American war crimes during the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, and Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency employee who exposed criminal mass government surveillance upon the American public, stand charged with the very same crimes that are likely to be brought against Trump. On both Assange and Snowden, Trump argued that they should be executed. Fortunately for all three, these statutes do not provide for capital punishment.

Rothbard warned that the feds aggressively protect themselves. Yet, both Assange and Snowden are heroic defenders of liberty with valid moral and legal defenses. Assange is protected by the Pentagon Papers case, which insulates the media from criminal or civil liability for revealing stolen matters of interest to the public, so long as the revealer is not the thief. Snowden is protected by the Constitution, which expressly prohibits the warrantless surveillance he revealed, which was the most massive peacetime abuse of government power.

What will Trump say is his defense to taking national defense information? I cannot think of a legally viable one.

... Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines’ proposed damage assessment of the documents is a remake of the January 2017 intelligence community assessment which claimed, without evidence, that Vladimir Putin wanted to put Trump in the Oval Office. The extensive redactions on the affidavit the FBI used to get a warrant to raid Trump’s home are akin to the excessive redactions on the application that the FBI showed a secret court in 2016 to get a warrant to spy on the Trump campaign. What was true for the original Russiagate holds here, too: The redactions are designed to hide not state secrets, but government corruption.

The Mar-a-Lago raid feels like Russiagate because, well, it is Russiagate: a conspiracy theory weaponized by the country’s courtier class to serve the interests of a delirious and deracinated oligarchy, spawning daily prophesies of doom fed by an endless supply of national security “leaks” asserting that the former commander-in-chief really was and is a secret Russian agent. And proof of the president’s treachery, chant the priestly keepers of the “collusion” mysteries, will soon be revealed to the public. It is their blanket justification for every past crime and every new banana republic-style abuse of power, accompanied by a drumbeat of ever more outlandish and violent threats.

It is in this context that the FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago should be understood: Government records and reports from political and media operatives and bureaucrats who previously starred in Russiagate I give evidence that the FBI raided Trump’s home to seize documents exposing the crimes that the FBI and Justice Department have been committing since 2016. The fact that Russiagate shows no signs of ending anytime soon is bad news for the republic, betrayed from within by a performative elite whose ability to project power outside its gilded bubble requires a steady supply of paranoia, fear, and hysteria.

...So was the FBI after what they believed to be Trump’s secret stash of Russiagate documents? The warrant was drawn so broadly that it allowed the agents to seize any document from Trump’s term in the White House. But an Aug. 26 New York Times story confirmed that the FBI was “spurred” to act after discovering Trump had retained “documents related to the use of ‘clandestine human sources,’”and other documents related to “foreign intercepts collected under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.”

Those at all familiar with Russiagate will recognize these keywords, employed by the same media organization that won a 2018 Pulitzer Prize for partnering with U.S. intelligence services to destabilize and delegitimize Trump’s presidency. The descriptions in the article also line up with what Trump reportedly declassified before he left the White House.

Yet if what the FBI was after were the Russiagate documents that it imagined were hidden somewhere at Mar-a-Lago, it’s not clear if the agents found them. According to the Times story, the safe in Trump’s closet “did not contain the materials investigators sought.” Maybe the materials were somewhere else. Perhaps Trump never had them. Trump allies I’ve spoken with don’t think he has the documents.

Garland’s dilemma now is whether to risk finding out the truth. Press reports suggest that he is undecided about indicting Trump. That makes sense—it would likely sow chaos across the country and, Garland must worry, perhaps force Trump’s hand. For if the former president does have the documents, in whatever form, and posts them, it might bring the house down on the U.S. national security apparatus and the Democratic administration that it shields.

The effect of the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago is therefore to obscure the real scandal: U.S. spies committed a series of crimes in their effort to unseat a U.S. president, and then ignored the lawful orders of that president in order to keep their crimes hidden from the American public.

What is preserving the stability of the United States at present is therefore something like a Mexican standoff. Does Trump actually have the documents? If so, will he put them before the public? Will Garland indict him, and risk finding out? Given the Biden administration’s tendency to instrumentalize the violence of its rhetoric and turn federal bureaucracies loose on its political opponents, it is likely that the standoff will not hold for long.

The Justice Department says more than 100 documents that the FBI seized during its August 8 search of Mar-a-Lago, former President Donald Trump's home and private club in Palm Beach, were marked as classified. Notwithstanding those markings, Trump insists, none of the records were actually classified because he had a "standing order" as president that automatically declassified documents he removed from the Oval Office to study at his residence in the White House. "The very fact that these documents were present at Mar-a-Lago," he said four days after the search, "means they couldn't have been classified."

In a brief they filed today in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, Trump's lawyers notably do not endorse that argument. But they do claim that the status of the "purported 'classified records'" seized by the FBI is a matter of dispute. "The Government has not proven these records remain classified," they say. "That issue is to be determined later."

Trump and the Justice Department are wrangling over the terms of an order that U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon issued last week. Cannon agreed with Trump that a neutral arbiter known as a "special master" should be appointed to review all the material seized at Mar-a-Lago. The special master is supposed to determine which documents might be protected by attorney-client privilege or, more controversially, executive privilege. In the meantime, Cannon said, the FBI may not use the documents to investigate whether Trump or his representatives committed federal felonies by improperly retaining and concealing the records.

Cannon's order allows intelligence agencies to continue a review aimed at determining whether and to what extent Trump's retention of the documents compromised national security. But in a motion filed last Thursday, federal prosecutors argued that her order would interfere with that process, which "cannot be readily segregated" from the criminal investigation. They asked Cannon for a partial stay allowing the FBI to continue examining the documents marked as classified, which represent a small subset of some 13,000 items removed from Mar-a-Lago. Failing that, they said, the government "intends to seek relief" from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit.

Responding to that motion today, Trump lawyers Christopher Kise, Lindsey Halligan, Evan Corcoran, and James Trusty say the government's concerns "appear exaggerated." They distinguish between the intelligence review, which seeks to determine "potential damage to national security from allegedly mishandling classified information," and the FBI's probe, which focuses on "criminal repercussions for allegedly mishandling classified information." They argue that the former can proceed even if the latter is suspended.

At the same time, Kise et al. question the premise underlying both processes. "The Government's stance assumes that if a document has a classification marking, it remains classified irrespective of any actions taken during President Trump's term in office," they say. "The Government claims this Court cannot enjoin use of the documents the Government has determined are classified. Therefore, the argument goes, as President Trump has no right to have the documents returned to him—because the Government has unilaterally determined they are classified—the Government should be permitted to continue to use them, in conjunction with the intelligence communities, to build criminal case against him. However, there still remains a disagreement as to the classification status of the documents."

That stance marks a shift from the position that Corcoran took in a May 25 letter to Jay Bratt, chief of the Counterintelligence and Export Control Section in the Justice Department's National Security Division. At that point, Corcoran was referring to documents "purportedly marked as classified." Now he admits the documents were in fact "marked as classified" while remaining agnostic about the significance of those labels.

Kise et al. note that "the President enjoys absolute authority…to declassify any information," and "there is no legitimate contention that the Chief Executive's declassification of documents requires approval of bureaucratic components of the executive branch." But unlike Trump, his lawyers do not claim he used that authority to declassify everything he took with him when he left the White House. Trump has presented no documentation of the "standing order" he supposedly issued, which was news to national security officials who should have known about it.

The documents marked as classified, which ranged from "confidential" to "top secret," included "sensitive compartmented information" on subjects such as human intelligence sources. Last week The Washington Post, citing "people familiar with the matter," reported that the records included information about a foreign nation's nuclear capabilities. The Post added that "some of the seized documents detail top-secret U.S. operations so closely guarded that many senior national security officials are kept in the dark about them."

By Trump's account, he nevertheless decided that the documents were not sensitive enough to keep them classified. Yet the automatic declassification he describes did not hinge on whether exposing the information would jeopardize national security. According to Trump, it applied to anything he happened to remove from the Oval Office. It also clearly did not entail changing the labels on the documents so that government employees would know how to handle and store them.

William Barr, Trump's former attorney general, thinks it is "highly improbable" that Trump had such a policy. But if he did, Barr told Fox News, it would have been remarkably careless: "If in fact he sort of stood over scores of boxes, not really knowing what was in them, and said, 'I hereby declassify everything in here,' that would be such an abuse and show such recklessness that it's almost worse than taking the documents."

Trump's lawyers do not even mention his purported "standing order," let alone delve into its implications. But as they see it, the FBI's investigation "at its core is a document storage dispute that has spiraled out of control." Instead of simply seeking to ensure that the "purported 'classified records'" were properly secured, they complain, "the Government wrongfully seeks to criminalize the possession by the 45th President of his own Presidential and personal records."

That gloss elides a couple of important points. Under federal law, those presidential records, classified or not, were not "his own." Contrary to what Trump seemed to think, they belonged in the National Archives. For a year and a half, Trump resisted efforts to recover the documents. He gave 15 boxes, including 184 documents marked as classified, to the National Archives in January, a year after leaving office. Last June, Corcoran and Christina Bobb, another Trump lawyer, handed over an additional 38 classified documents in response to a federal subpoena, at which point they assured the Justice Department that no more remained at Mar-a-Lago. Yet the FBI discovered more than 100 during its search.

In Krise et al.'s telling, that was no big deal. "There is no indication any purported 'classified records' were disclosed to anyone," they say. "Indeed, it appears such 'classified records,' along with the other seized materials, were principally located in storage boxes in a locked room at Mar-a-Lago, a secure, controlled access compound utilized regularly to conduct the official business of the United States during the Trump Presidency, which to this day is monitored by the United States Secret Service."

Unlike Trump, who still insists that he actually won reelection in 2020, his lawyers at least concede that his presidency ended in January 2021. But they seem to be implying that he retained some prerogatives of that office, including the authority to keep "purported 'classified records'" at the resort where he used to conduct presidential business.

Back in May, Corcoran told Bobb that documents "purportedly marked as classified" were "once in the White House and unknowingly included among the boxes brought to Mar-a-Lago by the movers." That description hardly inspires confidence about Trump's care in handling sensitive information. Nor does it seem consistent with his claim that he deliberately declassified everything. How can that be true if he did not even realize what was in the boxes, which included material that was "unknowingly" moved to Mar-a-Lago? And if there was nothing wrong with keeping the records, in what sense was taking them a mistake?

Although the documents were "principally located" in "a locked room at Mar-a-Lago," the FBI reportedly was alarmed by security camera video showing people removing material from that room. According to the Justice Department, the FBI's search discovered dozens of records with classification markings in other locations, including desk drawers and "a container" in Trump's office. The Post notes that the FBI also found "dozens of empty folders marked classified."

Those details suggest that the concerns underlying what Kise et al. describe as a "document storage dispute" may have been perfectly reasonable. That does not necessarily mean the threat to national security was grave and imminent enough to justify the unprecedented and politically explosive decision to search a former president's home. The intelligence review may or may not substantiate that claim. But based on what we know so far, the government's fears do not seem frivolous.

Despite Trump's focus on the issue, the three possible crimes cited in the FBI's search warrant do not hinge on whether the documents were still classified. The obstruction statute covers conduct aimed at interfering with a federal investigation. The law dealing with improper retention of government documents applies to unclassified as well as classified material. Even the Espionage Act provision cited by the FBI does not mention classification, referring instead to "defense information" that "could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation."

If the Justice Department decided to prosecute Trump on any of those charges, it might have trouble proving the requisite intent. But even if Trump's conduct can plausibly be attributed to some combination of ignorance, arrogance, laziness, and sloppiness, it should give pause to Republicans who were still inclined to support him.

The US justice department is reviewing documents marked classified found in President Joe Biden's former office at a think tank, the White House says.

About 10 of the files were discovered in a locked closet at the Penn Biden Center in Washington in November by Mr Biden's legal team, said his lawyer.

The batch has been handed over to the National Archives.

Mr Biden's predecessor, Donald Trump, is facing a probe for taking classified files to Florida after his presidency.

According to the BBC's US partner CBS News, the FBI is involved in the inquiry into classified documents found at the Penn Biden Center, and US Attorney General Merrick Garland has been asked to review the papers.

Mr Biden's lawyer said they relate to the period when he was vice-president. But it is unclear what the documents relate to, the level of classification involved or why they were there.

A source familiar with the matter told CBS News the batch did not contain nuclear secrets and had been contained in a folder in a box with other unclassified papers.

Richard Sauber, special counsel to President Biden, said in a statement to CBS on Monday that the files were discovered just before the midterm elections by Biden attorneys who were clearing out the office space.

Mr Biden kept an office at the think tank, which is about a mile from the White House, from 2017 to 2020....

Last August, the FBI searched former President Donald Trump's home at Mar-a-Lago, his Palm Beach resort, looking for classified documents. Last Friday, the FBI searched President Joe Biden's home in Wilmington, Delaware, looking for classified documents.

Both searches were unprecedented, and both turned up secret material stored in unauthorized locations. While the circumstances that led to the searches were starkly different, the broad parallels between the two investigations, each of which has been assigned to a special counsel, complicate already fraught decisions about whether Trump's retention of government records justifies criminal charges. They also raise the question of how common such sloppiness is and what it says about a system that is ostensibly aimed at protecting national security....

Two weeks ago, after CBS News broke the story of the documents in Biden's former office, the president said he had been "surprised" to learn about those records last fall. Last Thursday, after news reports revealed that additional classified material had been found at his house in Wilmington, Biden minimized the import of that development.

"We found a handful of documents were filed in the wrong place," Biden told reporters. "We immediately turned them over to the [National] Archives and the Justice Department….I think you're going to find there's nothing there….There's no there there."

At that point, it was clear that the number of classified documents "in the wrong place" exceeded "a handful." And the next day, the FBI found six more. Contrary to Biden's assurances, there was something there: a pattern of carelessness belying Special Counsel to the President Richard Sauber's claim that Biden "takes classified information and materials seriously." ...

Contrary to Biden's claim, however, none of this means "there's no there there." He cannot consistently maintain that the classification system is vitally important to protecting national security and that "inadvertently" violating its rules is no big deal, a mere clerical error involving documents that were "filed in the wrong place." That certainly was not Biden's take on Trump's handling of classified records, which he called "totally irresponsible" a couple of months before his own trove was discovered.

Even granting the differences between what Trump did and what Biden did, in terms of both volume and attitude, the only way Biden can escape similar criticism is by arguing that it does not really matter if classified material he handled ended up where it was not supposed to be, intermingled with personal records and mementos. But if that's true, either because the documents were classified for no good reason or because they remained classified long after the original rationale no longer applied, the whole system begins to look like a joke.

Biden's retention of classified material from his time as vice president went unnoticed for six years, while one or more secret documents that he came across as a senator remained in his private possession more than twice as long. How many classified records might be discovered in the homes or offices of other former federal officials if anyone bothered to search for them? And do those overlooked documents pose a real threat to national security, or only to the idea that the classification system should be taken seriously?