The Honest Straight-Shooters at the FBI Not Only Improperly Closed the Hunter Biden Laptop Case Without Cause, They Then Deliberately Buried Information In Hidden Sub-Folders So That No Other Analysts Could Find It

Margot Cleveland at The Federalist writes that this is worse than we initially thought.

Late Monday, Grassley issued a news release citing "multiple FBI whistleblowers, including those in senior positions," who raised "the alarm about tampering by senior FBI and Justice Department officials in politically sensitive investigations," including "investigative activity involving derogatory information on Hunter Biden's financial and foreign business activities." According to the Iowa Republican, the whistleblowers alleged that Washington Field Office Assistant Special Agent in Charge Timothy "Thibault and other FBI officials sought to falsely portray as disinformation evidence acquired from multiple sources that provided the FBI derogatory information related to Hunter Biden's financial and foreign business activities, even though some of that information had already been or could be verified."

The news release added that "in August of 2020, FBI supervisory intelligence analyst Brian Auten opened an assessment, which was used by a team of agents at FBI headquarters to improperly discredit and falsely claim that derogatory information about Biden's activities was disinformation, causing investigative activity and sourcing to be shut down." "The FBI headquarters team allegedly placed their assessment findings in a restricted access subfolder, effectively flagging sources and derogatory evidence related to Hunter Biden as disinformation while shielding the justification for such findings from scrutiny," according to Grassley.

The Iowa senator claimed that "Thibault also reportedly ordered the closure of a stream of information related to Hunter Biden and sought to improperly mark the matter within FBI systems in a way that would prevent it from being re-opened in the future." "The FBI headquarters team allegedly claimed that reporting from the stream was at risk of disinformation," but the whistleblowers told Grassley, "that all of the information obtained through that stream was already verified or verifiable."

The FBI whistleblowers' charges, if accurate, are devastating and mean that at a time that Hunter Biden was already reportedly under investigation by the Delaware U.S. Attorney's Office, rather than work with the agents already investigating then-candidate Joe Biden's son, FBI headquarters initiated its own "assessment." Then, according to the whistleblowers, agents improperly shut down sources, falsely framed evidence as disinformation, and hid the reasoning for that determination from other FBI agents behind restricted areas.

Margot Cleveland has more -- read her article about the fake "defense briefing" the FBI arranged for Ron Johnson a pretext, for the singular purpose of later leaking the existence of that briefing to the Washington Post so they could say, "We told Johnson he was being manipulated by RUSSIAN DISINFORMATION."

A little more from Catherine Herridge.

He said whistleblowers from federal law enforcement came forward to his office after a May 31 letter he had written noted a "pattern of active public partisanship in his then public social media content," in reference to Thibault.

He was a very loud and very strident leftwing anti-Trump liberal on social media.

So of course he's trusted with analyzing whether Trump's opponent's son's laptop -- showing shady business dealings with Chinese spymasters and Russian gangsters -- was authentic.

What other ringer would the FBI assign to it? They know who they're voting for; they know which way they want the report to come out.

Today's FBI -- Yesterday's Mafia.

In that May 31 letter, Grassley also accused Thibault of likely violations of "[f]ederal laws, regulations and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) guidelines."

"Whistleblowers have reported to me, that although the FBI and Justice Department maintain policies dictating specific standards requiring substantial factual predication to initiate an investigation, Thibault and other Justice Department and FBI employees failed to comply with these requirements."

The letter also singled out Justice Department official Richard Pilger, identified as the director of the Election Crimes Branch within the Justice Department's Public Integrity Section, who, along with Thibault, were alleged to be "deeply involved in the decisions to open and pursue this investigation," an apparent reference to a probe recently opened into the Trump campaign.

Oh and they put this vocal public Trump hater on that, too.

Perfect.

Grassley told Wray and Garland "the opening memo you approved," included media reporting citing research from a "liberal non-profit" when a full investigation of a political nature requires "a heightened factual basis."

Oh and they're citing "research" from Brookings or Media Matters or whatever leftwing "non-profit."

Again, perfect.

posted by Ace at 01:00 PM

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