Wednesday, August 31, 2022

Thibault Resigns

 My first thought was "Who"?

Evidently, he was a mid-level manager who had a hyper partisan political bent, and he tweeted about it.  Some sources say he was the guy who stopped the Hunter Biden laptop investigation.

For the first twenty years of my cop career, I worked in a state agency under civil service rules.  There were certain things we could and could not do in the political sphere, and we knew it.   We were allowed to have an opinion, and to vote, but that was about it.  Any political activity would get you disciplined or fired.

Many cops today don't have Twitter accounts or Facebook accounts, because of several concerns, one being that embarrassing the agency will get you fired.  We all know the rules, and some things are what we call "career moves".  You do things A, it's a career move.  You do thing B, it's a career move too.  Thibault made a career move.  Several of them, from all accounts.

Some wags are saying that Thibault is a symbolic Judas goat, the guy they will blame the sins of the agency on.  And, they are trying to do that, whether he was fired or resigned, he is the public face of the rot in the Bureau.  But, it goes deeper than that.  The higher-ups in the agency tolerated Thibault's partisan activity until they could no longer wink at it.  

Thibault was not the problem in the FBI.  Thibault was a symptom of a larger problem. With many calling for the Bureau to be either drastically reformed or abolished altogether, he was the sacrificial goat to be trotted out before the media.

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