An unnamed FBI agent in charge of the Hunter Biden tax probe told now-retired FBI Special Agent Timothy Thibault in October 2020 to shut down a second “politically connected” informant, Breitbart News Senior Contributor Peter Schweizer, according to recent congressional testimony.
Thibault, who previously refused to cooperate with House Republicans’ probe into the bureau’s handling of Hunter Biden’s “Laptop from Hell,” sat for a transcribed interview last week about his involvement in the Hunter Biden tax probe. The former agent told investigators the order to shut down the second informant “shocked” him because “a confidential informant is to support a case,” Thibault said, according to a transcript reviewed by Just the News.
The New York Times published an article in May 2023, outing Breitbart News Senior Contributor Peter Schweizer as the informant:
Mr. Schweizer had recently published a book, “Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite,” delving into the financial dealings of the Biden family. The agents, Mr. Schweizer said, wanted to know if he could share documents related to Hunter Biden’s foreign business ties that he might have gathered for his work. Mr. Schweizer said he passed on corporate records and other files.
After The New York Post reported on the younger Mr. Biden’s laptop in October 2020, Mr. Schweizer said he informed the F.B.I. agents that he had a copy of the laptop’s contents, which were circulating in right-wing circles. But even though the agents had expressed interest, Mr. Schweizer said they never followed up, and in the end, “I never sent anything to them.”
“The FBI approached me in the summer of 2020 concerning sharing information about corruption-involved public officials, particularly as it related to my public research on the Bidens,” Schweizer told Breitbart News on Monday.
“I have cooperated with the FBI and other law enforcement organizations in the past and will happily do so in the future,” he continued. “The information that I shared was not right-wing or left-wing; it was simply records and documents concerning Biden’s overseas financial activities. Facts are facts. The fact that Thibault sees bias in this work is a reflection of his biases — not mine.”
RELATED — Schweizer: Dems Narrative on Joe’s Biden Involvement Has “Reached a Point of Absurdity”
The alleged order to shut down the informant follows whistleblower allegations that politics influenced the Justice Department’s probe into Hunter Biden. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) believes the bureau refused to investigate an FBI informant’s FD-1023 form, which claims Hunter and President Joe Biden each accepted a $5 million bribe.
RELATED — Grassley: Whistleblowers Allegedly Have Evidence of Hunter’s Criminal Conduct, Joe Biden’s Knowledge
House Judiciary GOP / YouTube“As you are aware, IRS whistleblowers have affirmed that AUSA [Assistant U.S. Attorney] Wolf prevented investigators from seeking information about Joe Biden’s involvement in Hunter Biden’s criminal business arrangements,” Grassley wrote in the letter to Now-Special Counsel David Weiss.
IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley testified at a September 2020 meeting that Assistant U.S. Attorney Lesley Wolf of Delaware said there was “more than enough probable cause for the physical search warrant there [at the Biden storage unit], but the question was whether the juice was worth the squeeze.”
RELATED: IRS Whistleblower Speaks Publicly for First Time, Says DOJ Intervened to Slow-Walk Hunter Probe to “Benefit” Him
The alleged timing of Wolf’s statement appears consistent with Thibault’s testimony. Thibault testified that he arrived as a new supervisor in the Washington office in the summer of 2020 and soon learned about an FD-1023 form, although the FBI prevented him from reviewing the source file.
“Sometime in September — and this is a recollection — the FBI did not allow me to go back and review a source file. Okay? I have a recollection of a 1023, which is a source report, raw source report, and of reviewing it and/or approving it,” he said. “The reason why I say I approved it, sometimes it’s — it involved a sensitive source, I believe. Somehow, I saw that source report,” he said. “And I believe I approved it. At the very least, I reviewed it, I believe. To me, when I first saw it, it didn’t stick out.”
Thibault said he then received an unsolicited call from the supervisor of the Hunter Biden case. The supervisor told Thibault he had “concerns” about the FBI bribery informant based on the source’s political and media engagement.
“I said, ‘Okay. What are your concerns?’ And (he) basically said, ‘Look, the information isn’t of any value to us, number one.’ I deduced from everything he said that they already had the … from some other source, some other channel, maybe not a human source but some other channel,” Thibault testified. “He also said that that person was politically connected and partisan in his view, and he was concerned about the source being on media platforms. At the time, I, you know, was fairly new.”
Grassley previously accused Thibault of shutting down the FBI’s October 2020 probe into Hunter Biden’s laptop, the exact time frame Thibault described the shutdown of the bribery informant. “Thibault’s account raises the possibility that the episode Grassley cited was actually driven by the Delaware prosecution team and simply carried out by Thibault,” Just the News reported.
Weiss, nominated by two Democrat senators, gave Hunter Biden a sweetheart plea deal that only fell apart under judicial scrutiny. Weiss also allowed the statute of limitations to expire on more serious charges against Hunter Biden.
RELATED — IRS Whistleblower: Weiss “Is Not Independent,” and He’ll Give Hunter “Preferential Treatment” Again
In 2018 and 2020, Breitbart Senior Contributor and Government Accountability Institute President Peter Schweizer published Secret Empires and Profiles in Corruption. Each book hit #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and exposed how Hunter Biden and Joe Biden flew aboard Air Force Two in 2013 to China before Hunter’s firm inked a $1.5 billion deal with a subsidiary of the Chinese government’s Bank of China less than two weeks after the trip. Schweizer’s work also uncovered the Biden family’s other vast and lucrative foreign deals and cronyism.
Breitbart Political Editor Emma-Jo Morris’s investigative work at the New York Post on the Hunter Biden “Laptop from Hell” also captured international headlines when she, along with Miranda Devine, revealed that Joe Biden was intimately involved in Hunter’s businesses, appearing to have a ten percent stake in a company the scion formed with officials at the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party.
Follow Wendell Husebø on Twitter @WendellHusebø. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality.
