Two senior Senate Republican lawmakers called on Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel to investigate potential criminal leaks to the media of sensitive and classified information ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
Sens. Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin also asked Ms. Bondi and Mr. Patel to investigate former Assistant Special Agent in Charge Timothy Thibault and his associates’ potential breach of FBI information sharing policies.
Mr. Grassley leads the Judiciary Committee and Mr. Johnson is chairman of the permanent subcommittee on investigations.
According to the GOP lawmakers, legally protected whistleblower disclosures have revealed that Mr. Thibault shared sensitive, non-public investigative information from his FBI email account with a private citizen with whom he was romantically involved.
“The FBI repeatedly lectures Congress, without any legitimate basis, that it can’t share information with Congress because the matter is an ongoing investigation,” Mr. Grassley and Mr. Johnson wrote.
“The FBI has asserted to Congress that [For Official Use Only] information and FBI email accounts and personnel names should remain non-public. Yet, here, Thibault sent all of that type of information to a private citizen while the FBI stiff-arms Congress and the American people,” the senators added.
The GOP lawmakers said that Mr. Thibault’s conduct “exemplifies the FBI’s ‘do as I say, not as I do’ hypocrisy.”
The lawmakers noted news reports released just before the November 2024 election containing potentially “classified U.S. intelligence” as a further example of DOJ and FBI officials sharing investigative information while ignoring congressional requests for the same.
Mr. Grassley and Mr. Johnson asked the DOJ and FBI to open a criminal media-leak investigation to hold accountable those responsible for sharing potentially classified and other sensitive information to the press.
Last month, Mr. Grassley and Mr. Johnson released internal FBI emails and documents that exposed a purported political scheme against President Trump by Mr. Thibault.
According to the lawmakers, he went outside established agency protocols for opening probes to help launch the federal election interference case against Mr. Trump.
Mr. Thibault authored the initial language for what ultimately became special prosecutor Jack Smith’s federal case against Mr. Trump regarding the 2020 presidential election, according to the new whistleblower documents provided by the GOP senators.
According to the records, Mr. Thibault essentially opened and approved his own investigation, for which the FBI titled the subsequent investigation “Arctic Frost.”
• Kerry Picket can be reached at kpicket@washingtontimes.com.