FBI Accused of 'Hiding' Damning Whistleblower Intel on Hunter Biden Ahead of 2020 Election

Former top-level FBI agent Timothy Thibault, who resigned on 26 August, came under fire earlier this year from Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa who alleged the officer had thwarted the investigation into dubious business dealings of the president's son, Hunter Biden.

Former FBI agent Timothy Thibault has been accused of concealing damning whistleblower intelligence on Hunter Biden, according to sources cited by the New York Post.

Thibault has faced a barrage of Republican criticism for alleged political partisanship in his work linked to the ongoing probe into the business dealings of President Joe Biden’s son.

The FBI agent, who has since resigned, was assigned by the Washington Field Office as “point man” to manage Tony Bobulinski, Hunter Biden’s former business partner, before the 2020 election, according to the publication.

However, the evidence provided to the FBI by Bobulinski in a secret interview given on 23 October 2020, was deliberately suppressed, sources claim.

Bobulinski purportedly had profuse inside knowledge of then-presidential candidate Joe Biden’s involvement in his son’s business deals with China - something the 46th POTUS has repeatedly denied.

Former Hunter Biden business associate Tony Bobulinski gives a statement to "set the record straight" about the Biden family's business dealings with China on October 22, 2020.

© Sputnik Screenshot

Bobulinski had reportedly handed over to the FBI the contents of three cellphones containing encrypted messages between Hunter Biden and his business partners. Emails and financial documents had also been provided by the whistleblower, shedding light on the Biden family’s "influence-peddling" in foreign countries during Joe Biden’s vice-presidency.

The trove of damning documents from the now-notorious ‘laptop from hell’ that Joe Biden’s son abandoned at a repair store in Delaware, had originally been reported on by The Post on 14 October 2020. The documents had hinted at possible criminal activity involving the “pay-to-play” scheme in which Hunter Biden was paid by foreign business interests in exchange for political access to his powerful father, Joe Biden.

Emails on the laptop's hard drive also contained numerous references to a mysterious “big guy” and “pops” due to get a 10 percent cut of the lucrative joint venture with Chinese firm CEFC.

At the time, the bombshell story had been dismissed by mainstream news outlets and social media companies as “Russian disinformation”. Accordingly, in line with a distinct pattern, evidence provided by Bobulinski appears to have been swept under the rug, the report claimed.

‘Credible Evidence’

In 2020, 11 days before the presidential election and approximately a week after the New York Post broke the Hunter Biden laptop story, Bobulinski entered the FBI’s Washington Field Office, according to the outlet. He had been instructed not to walk in the front door, but to drive into an underground parking garage at the back of the building in north-west Washington, DC.

Bobulinski was met by James Dawson, then-special agent in charge of the Criminal and Cyber Division, and FBI Supervisory Special Agent Giulio Arseni, who turned him over to two younger agents, William Novak and Garrett Churchill, for the video-taped interview.

According to evidence provided by the whistleblower, Hunter, his uncle Jim Biden, and partners James Gilliar and Rob Walker used the Biden name in 2015 and 2016 to aid CEFC Energy, a now defunct China-based company, expand its reach into Oman, Romania, Georgia, Kazakhstan and other countries during Joe Biden’s time as vice-president.

Bobulinski is also said to have shed light for the FBI on Hunter Biden’s lucrative personal relationship with CEFC chairman Ye Jianming. It is also claimed that the FBI agents heard about Hunter’s associations with Ukrainian oil and natural gas businessman, politician, and oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky, who in 2002 co-founded oil and natural gas company Burisma Holdings. Bobulinski’s interview is also said to have revealed Hunter’s ties with Romanian billionaire Gabriel Popoviciu, and with retired FBI Director Louis Freeh. The latter is described as having acted as a consultant, recruited by Hunter to help Popoviciu dodge corruption charges in Romania.

According to insiders, throughout the interview FBI Supervisory Special Agent Arseni entered the room occasionally, as did an FBI forensic team.

Bobulinski and his lawyer were reportedly given Thibault’s cellphone number and told that he would be their FBI “point man” from then on.

However, Bobulinski, who had provided information corroborating the damning material on Hunter’s laptop - in the FBI’s possession since December 2019 - was not contacted again.

Furthermore, the Delaware grand jury investigating Hunter also failed to summon Bobulinski as its witness, despite the fact that he had met with Joe Biden twice in 2017 over the CEFC deal.

‘Quashed’ Reporting

Thibault retired from the FBI on 26 August while being investigated by the Office of Special Counsel over his anti-Trump social media posts. He had faced accusations from Republican senators that he buried Hunter Biden material so that it would not damage Joe Biden’s candidacy in 2020.

According to whistleblowers cited by GOP Senator Chuck Grassley, in the same month Bobulinski was interviewed by the FBI, Thibault - who at the time was Assistant Special Agent in Charge - ordered that a probe into Hunter's alleged “criminal financial and related activity” be shut down.

“In October 2020, an avenue of additional derogatory Hunter Biden reporting was ordered closed at the direction of ASAC Thibault,” Grassley wrote in a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland.

“… Thibault allegedly ordered the matter closed without providing a valid reason, as required by FBI guidelines [and] it’s alleged that FBI officials, including ASAC Thibault, subsequently attempted to improperly mark the matter in FBI systems so that it could not be opened in the future.”

In another letter, addressed to Garland and Wray, the Republicans demanded records relating to the DOJ and FBI’s contact with Facebook, Twitter, and other social media companies relating to the Biden family. The GOP senators have denounced the FBI’s “consistent failure to answer congressional inquiries”.

“The FBI’s consistent efforts to falsely paint information relating to Biden family misconduct as Russian disinformation continues to draw serious concerns,” they wrote.

Thibault has denied Grassley’s allegations, with a statement from his lawyer saying he “did not supervise the investigation of Hunter Biden which … is being handled by the Baltimore Field Office".

Questions remain as to what Thibault did with the information received from Bobulinski. It is not known whether he passed the intelligence on to the FBI’s Baltimore field office, which was assisting Delaware US Attorney David Weiss’ four-year probe of Hunter Biden for alleged tax evasion and money laundering.

However, if the information had, indeed, been passed on, the question arises, claim insiders, why Bobulinski never testified before the grand jury convened by Weiss in 2021. If the FBI failed to investigate "credible evidence" implicating a US presidential candidate in a dubious scheme involving millions of dollars ostensibly paid to his family by China, such actions may constitute interference-by-omission in the 2020 election, concluded the report.