(FiveNation.com)- An agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) could face criminal charges after promoting anti-Trump content on social media. The official is being investigated for potentially breaking the law.
Republican Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley sent a letter to the Department of Justice (DOJ) Inspector General Michael Horowitz, urging the inspector to investigate the FBI agent, Timothy Thibault, for “potential violations of federal regulations and Department guidelines designed to prevent political bias from infecting FBI matters.”
The inspector responded concurring with Grassley, saying that some actions described in the senator’s letter might have violated the Hatch Act.
“After carefully reviewing the information in your letter, we determined that some of the allegations and conduct you described in your letter implicate potential violations of the Hatch Act, which limits certain political activities of federal employees,” the letter to Grassley states.
The matter has been handed over to the U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC). The Hatch Act was passed in 1939 with the intention to limit political activity from federal government employees, so that programs are not conducted in a partisan fashion, according to the OSC.
Thibault was in charge of overseeing “federal public corruption investigations,” Grassley wrote to Attorney General Merrick Garland, arguing that the agent’s propriety on social media demonstrates “a pattern of improper commentary.”
In a statement to the Daily Caller News Foundation, Tom Jones, executive director of the federal watchdog American Accountability Foundation, said that these public corruption investigations are extremely “sensitive” cases, where officials should not engage in partisanship.
Thibault reportedly liked a LinkedIn post of a Washington Post article that argued that the former president should have been prosecuted by the DOJ a long time ago, along with his former campaign adviser Roger Stone, for their alleged ties to Russia. The investigations linking Trump and his cabinet members to Russia has yielded no fruitful results.
Recently, Michael Sussman who worked for the Hillary Clinton campaign was acquitted on charges of making false statements to the FBI. The case was followed by Special Counsel Robert Muller’s investigation into Trump’s ties with Russia. During the trial former Hillary Clinton campaign manager, Robby Mook, reportedly admitted that Clinton approved the dissemination of Trump-Russia propaganda in an attempt to discredit Trump.
