When California Rep. Darrell Issa appeared with Judge Jeanine Pirro Wednesday to discuss the FBI and DOJ, he brought up an interesting point about FBI agent Timothy Thibault leaving the agency. Since Inspector General Michael Horowitz can speak only with current employees of the DOJ/FBI, Thibault is effectively out of his reach for any internal investigation.

We couldn’t report with certainty yesterday whether Thibault had resigned from the agency after being reassigned or had been fired. But in an update from CBS NEWS’ Catherine Herridge, his attorneys at the firm Morrison and Foerster LLP have announced that he has retired. Thibault “was not fired, not forced to retire, and not asked to retire,” they said in a statement.

They said the “headquarters-like” agents who escorted him out were simply two long-time agent friends, with him as he finished processing his paperwork. “Claims to the contrary are false,” according to the statement. And though whistleblowers have reportedly complained of Thibault’s partisanship, his attorneys insisted he’s done nothing wrong. They essentially denied everything.

In particular, their statement addressed allegations of certain politically motivated actions in investigations, including the treatment of Hunter’s laptop, saying he “welcomes any investigation of these allegations, regardless of his retirement. He firmly believes that any investigation will conclude that his supervision, leadership and decision making were not impacted by political bias or partisanship of any kind. He is confident that all of his decisions were consistent with the FBI’s highest standards for ethics and integrity.”

My concern is that the FBI has lowered the bar so much that this isn’t anything to brag about.

His attorneys denied his involvement in the raid on Mar-A-Lago and said he was not involved in the investigation of Hunter Biden and made no decision about the laptop. (The latter denial directly contradicts whistleblowers if news reports are correct, and Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley also seems to be under a very different impression, based on his own statement.) At the same time, Thibault’s lawyers ignored the allegations that he pressured agents to reclassify cases to pad the numbers and make “domestic violent extremism” look like more of an issue than it is. If they could have denied these, they probably would have.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/justice/fbi-agent-hunter-biden-whistleblower-resigned

The point remains, if Inspector General Horowitz wants to look into any of this, he won’t be able to interview Thibault, as Thibault...has...left the building! So, in that sense, it seems like a great time to retire.

Horowitz said this summer that Thibault might have violated the Hatch Act over his social media posts, which attacked President Trump and former Attorney General William Barr. Thibault’s attorneys say these allegations are being investigated through the Office of Special Counsel John Durham and that he’s cooperating.

A few days ago, I linked to an article by Jeff Carlson about retrieval of RussiaGate documents from the Crossfire Hurricane investigation likely being the real reason for the raid on Mar-A-Lago. Now, Lee Smith, author of THE PLOT AGAINST THE PRESIDENT, is providing support for the same hypothesis. He said that according to people he thoroughly trusts, the FBI raid was a search for RussiaGate documents that they don’t want in Trump’s hands.

In an interview with Joel Pollak on Sirius XM’s “Breitbart News Sunday,” Smith said the people whose insight he was relying on “have much more insight” and “much more knowledge” than he does. He pointed out what we’ve been saying: that the same cast of characters has been involved in so-called investigations of Trump for years. In fact, Smith recalled a report we recently featured: “FBI Unit Leading Mar-A-Lago Probe Earlier Ran Discredited Trump-Russia Investigation.”

The orchestrated get-Trump effort got started in 2016, or likely even in 2015. Surveillance of Trump started during the Obama administration, and Smith maintains that Obama must have known about it. But now, with the emergence of these whistleblowers, Smith postulates that the anti-Trump operatives might be getting wary, even of each other. “We want them fearful of each other,” he said.

This will help us deter them “while we’re working to restore our constitutional order.”

“In a constitutional order,” he continued, “corrupt federal law enforcement officers would be charged, tried and, if found guilty, convicted. But we don’t live under those circumstances right now...” For the moment, he said, we’re living in more of a “regime order.”

https://www.breitbart.com/radio/2022/08/29/exclusive-lee-smith-people-i-trust-say-fbi-raid-was-search-for-russiagate-documents-at-mar-a-lago/

Stephen Kruiser at PJ MEDIA would agree, and he notes in this must-read column that to maintain their hold, the left are having to lie more and more outrageously. For them, it’s full-out ideological war, with the endgame of one-party rule in America. “What has changed now,” he says, “is the level of hyperbole and the complete absence of truthfulness in their rhetoric.”

https://pjmedia.com/columns/stephen-kruiser/2022/08/30/democrats-dishonest-fearmongering-is-the-real-threat-to-democracy-n1624548

Finally, Sundance at THE CONSERVATIVE TREEHOUSE gets much more specific about this very situation, asking why Democrats are so intent on attacking Trump and labeling his supporters threats to democracy. He says what we have now can be traced to the passage of the Patriot Act in the aftermath of 9/11, and he nails it here: “What President Obama and AG Eric Holder did was take the pre-existing system and retool it, so the weapons of government conducting surveillance only targeted one side of the political continuum. Domestic terrorists were now defined through the prism of political opposition.”

What we have now is essentially a domestic surveillance state, “with a targeting mechanism based on political ideology,” he says. Really, if you read one article addressing the massive, attempted take-down of Trump that’s going on right now, in plain sight in front of the whole world, this has to be THE ONE. It’s a masterful explanation of how we got here and what the current dynamic is now that a fourth branch of government, the unelected “Intelligence Branch,” has been crafted and put to work with social media platforms and political operatives. It explains why simply defunding the Intelligence Community is not enough, and why DC is so set on federalizing elections and minimizing transparency. (“Our elections have been usurped by the Intelligence Branch,” he says. “Start with honest elections and we will see just how much Democrat AND Republican corruption is dependent on manipulated election results.”)

By the way, this piece supports our suspicion that Obama attorney Lisa Monaco is really running the show at the DOJ, to protect Obama and those responsible for the current “Intelligence Branch,” in what actually is the third term of Barack Obama. (We’d say to look for the next Democrat presidential nominee to be his machine’s choice for Obama Term 4.)

It might be said that the system really has, in a sense, been “fundamentally transformed,” as Obama once infamously said he’d do. “Preserving this system is also what removing Donald Trump is all about,” Sundance concludes. “The targeting of President Trump in order to preserve the system, the system that was created during the Bush administration, then weaponized during the Obama administration, is what the actions of the DOJ and FBI are all about.”

Is it all making sense now? This piece is quite long, but please hold onto it for when you have time to settle in for a fascinating, enlightening and at times shocking read.

https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2022/08/31/why-is-washington-dc-so-intensely-focused-on-targeting-donald-trump-and-labeling-his-supporters-as-threats-to-democracy/