Americans may soon learn more about how a FBI agent worked with a liberal group to target President Donald Trump in a criminal investigation.
The non-profit public interest law firm Judicial Watch announced in a statement it “filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Justice for communications between former Assistant Special Agent in Charge Timothy Thibault and the anti-Trump organization American Oversight.”
“It’s a shame that we must sue to get these records about how the Biden gang at the FBI and DOJ tried to rig an election by jailing Trump for disputing the 2020 election,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “It’s past time for these institutions to focus on transparency under law, so the American people can know the full truth on the lawfare attack perpetrated on Trump.”
Judicial Watch reports it filed the suit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia “after the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) failed to respond to a January 31, 2025, FOIA request for:”
Records and communications between Timothy Thibault, former [Assistant Special Agent in Charge, Washington Field Office] and the non-profit organization American Oversight, 1030 15th St. NW, B255, Washington, D.C. 20005, email domain: @americanoversight. The search terms for this request are a) Trump b) Electors c) Investigation d) election
According to Judicial Watch, “in July 2022, U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) reportedly warned then-Attorney General Merrick Garland that Thibault and an official in the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, Richard Pilger, were ‘deeply involved in the decisions to open and pursue election-related investigations against President Trump. At the time, whistleblowers told Grassley that the Thibault-Pilger investigation’s predicating document was based on information from “liberal nonprofit American Oversight.”’ Thibault retired in August 2022.”
Grassley and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) have revealed in a statement that:
Internal FBI emails and predicating documents provided to Grassley and released jointly by the two senators show Timothy Thibault, a former FBI Assistant Special Agent in Charge (ASAC) who was forced to retire from the Bureau after Grassley exposed his public anti-Trump bias, authored the initial language for what ultimately became Jack Smith’s federal case against Trump regarding the 2020 presidential election. Records show Thibault essentially opened and approved his own investigation.
Judicial Watch reports American Oversight describes itself as “founded in 2017 in response to the unprecedented challenges that the Trump administration posed to our nation’s democratic ideals and institutions.…” Earlier this year, Politico described it as, “A left-leaning watchdog group … working to gather materials that could feed Congressional investigations into the Trump administration.”
