Madame President,
Today, I come to the floor to speak about a January 30, 2025, New York Times article from Adam Goldman and Alan Feuer about my and Senator Johnson’s oversight.
In that article, they said “FBI emails released Thursday showed that agents and officials followed standard procedure” when opening the Trump elector case.
The article written by these two can be summed up like this: a big wet kiss to the politically-biased leadership within the FBI.
Last week, Senator Johnson and I made public FBI records that showed a snapshot into the origins of the Jack Smith elector case against Trump.
Those records included a February 14, 2022, email from Assistant Special Agent in Charge Thibault to his subordinate agent, Michelle Ball. The subject line of that email is “Elector Matter.”
My office has been told that Thibault hand-picked subordinate agents, including Michelle Ball and Jamie Garman, who are both referenced in the documents released, to conceal his role as an initiating agent. The documents Senator Johnson and I released support that.
Now, in the February 2022 email, Thibault says, in part, “Here is draft opening language we discussed.”
Attached to that email is a word document titled “Elector.” That word document, when opened, contains information that became part of the predicating document that would later be approved to open the case codenamed “Arctic Frost.”
When opening the word document, it says this “Author: Timothy Thibault.”
It also says this, “Last modified by: Timothy Thibault.”
I’ll be publicly releasing today a new email that I’ve obtained that was sent from Thibault to Michelle Ball and Jamie Garman on March 1, 2022. In the email Thibault says, “To add…will come by to discuss.” A document was attached to the email with language to be added to the Arctic Frost document opening the investigation.
The document attached to the email lists the author and modifier as, you guessed it, Thibault.
The document itself is titled “Arctic Frost” and it adds President Trump as a criminal subject to the investigation. Notably, the document lists then-Chairman Durbin’s 2021 investigative report on Trump to help justify adding Trump, yet fails to use my 2021 report which provides much needed context.
Now, the New York Times article said the FBI records Senator Johnson and I made public “showed that agents and officials followed standard procedure.” But, that totally ignores the facts and evidence, let alone the FBI rules.
Section 7.7.1 in the FBI’s Domestic Investigations Operations Guide, essentially the FBI’s manual, is titled “Opening Documentation.”
That rule shows the work flow approval and makes clear that supervisors are to approve work product provided to them.
In other words, the intent of this rule, based on its plain text, is that subordinate agents provide work product to supervising agents for the latter’s approval.
Should there be any doubt about this intent, look no further than Section 3.5.2.3 titled “No Self-Approval Rule.”
That rule says, in part, “an approval official” – and the rule uses the word supervisor to define this person – “may not self-approve his/her own work or activity. An independent evaluation and approval of these activities must be obtained, including the opening and closing of any Assessment or predicated investigation.”
Then the rule says this: “In the event that an FBI employee errantly conducts a self-approval, the approval is considered substantial non-compliance and must be documented.”
Moreover, another FBI document defines the “general roles and privileges” of supervisors as this: “Supervisor – assigns leads; approve documents; assign squad current workload.”
None of this says a supervisor like Thibault is allowed to draft and open a case and approve it for themselves.
Based on the facts and evidence that Senator Johnson and I’ve obtained to-date, and based on the FBI’s own rules, Thibault essentially self-approved his own case, in violation of FBI rules.
Accordingly, Arctic Frost, as they codenamed the Trump case, was defective from the start – not only from a political infection standpoint, but also because of substantial non-compliance with FBI rules.
At this point, is the New York Times simply an FBI stenographer and propogandist parroting FBI lies claiming the emails released by me and Senator Johnson “showed that agents and officials followed standard procedure” when opening Arctic Frost?
As with most of the information in the leaks the FBI has laundered through Goldman, the truth is the opposite of the FBI and the New York Times’ narrative.
Does the New York Times truly believe that it’s normal for an Assistant Special Agent in Charge to prepare case predication for the opening of an investigation and then feed it to a street agent?
Is it normal for FBI agents to ignore sourcing that counteracts the predication they so badly want to manufacture?
Is it normal for an Assistant Special Agent in Charge to post anti-Trump social media posts under his true name and title while he’s overseeing the most politically sensitive investigations for the FBI?
Is it normal for an Assistant Special Agent in Charge responsible for the most sensitive political investigations in the FBI to be forced to resign for partisanship on the job and then be found to have violated the Hatch Act for that same partisanship?
Seems to this Senator that the New York Times has become the paid publicist of senior members of the FBI.
An unethical quid pro quo of pushing their narratives in exchange for publishing false narratives.
On the occasion of the latest article as a mouthpiece for nameless FBI sources, I invite the New York Times Editorial Board to undertake its own investigation into Goldman’s receipt of one-sided law enforcement information leaked to him from FBI employees.
Absent that, continued New York Times reporting in this area is inherently questionable.
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