WASHINGTON – Today, Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations Chairman Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) sent a letter requesting 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. The senators are also requesting Bondi and Patel investigate former Assistant Special Agent in Charge, Timothy Thibault, and his associates’ potential breach of FBI information sharing policies, in light of legally protected whistleblower disclosures revealing 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. 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 wrote. “Thibault’s conduct exemplifies the FBI’s ‘do as I say, not as I do’ hypocrisy and why its repeated complaints to Congress when it makes government information public should fall on deaf ears,” the senators concluded. Sens. Johnson and Grassley pointed to news reporting released shortly before the November 2024 election containing potentially “classified U.S. intelligence,” as a further example of DOJ and FBI officials sharing non-public investigative information while ignoring congressional requests for the same. Accordingly, the senators are requesting DOJ and FBI open a criminal media leak investigation to hold accountable those responsible for sharing potentially classified and other sensitive information with the press. The senators also made public an award given to Special Agent Walter Giardina, an FBI employee who worked on aspects of the Mueller and Jack Smith investigations, which he received for investigating Trump.
