Sure he retired. Sure he did.

As of yesterday, FBI Assistant Special Agent in Charge Timothy Thibault (pronounced TEE-bo followed by a French chuckle) is no longer with the FBI. But it’s not because he “retired,” which is what “a source familiar with the matter” told Fox News. And it’s not because he wanted to, uh, spend more time with his family.

Thibault was at or near the center of far too many bad stories coming out of the bureau in recent years, and he was escorted out of the building yesterday because he’s a rotten cop, shot through with anti-Trump, anti-Republican bias. Indeed, his very presence in the J. Edgar Hoover Building had become both a distraction and an impediment.

In short: FBI whistleblowers blew the whistle on him. Next up: fellow bad cop Brian Auten, who, along with Thibault, has been in Republican Senator Chuck Grassley’s sights for some time now. (We’d like to see smarmy, evasive FBI Director Christopher Wray escorted out of the building as well, but that’s wishful thinking. Much as we like the fact that Thibault is no longer infecting the bureau, we also know that he’s a cutout — like Kevin Clinesmith of Spygate infamy, Thibault is a convenient means of keeping the investigation of the bureau’s bias from claiming any heads higher up the chain.) As Miranda Devine wrote in yesterday’s New York Post:

As we know now from whistleblowers who came forward to Sen. Chuck Grassley, the FBI obstructed its own investigation of the laptop. Timothy Thibault, an FBI assistant special agent in charge at the Washington field office, has been on leave since Grassley started raising concerns about his suppression of negative information about Hunter before the 2020 election.

The whistleblowers also told Grassley that the FBI had “developed information about Hunter Biden’s criminal financial and related activity … verified and verifiable derogatory information” but that was “falsely labeled as disinformation” by FBI supervisory intelligence analyst Brian Auten in August 2020. Auten has been identified as the analyst who failed to alert his colleagues in 2016 to the “inconsistencies” in the phony Steele dossier, cooked up by the Clinton campaign to claim Trump was a Russian agent. The same playbook was being applied to the Hunter Biden information.

In any case, Thibault and Auten, if the latter follows the former, would be a small price for Democrats to pay for the FBI’s role in rigging the 2020 election. As Margot Cleveland writes, “[Facebook CEO Mark] Zuckerberg’s admission on Thursday that Big Tech throttled the [Hunter Biden] story at the behest of the FBI reveals a deeper scandal: It was the FBI and not social media that stole the election from Donald Trump.”

Let that sink in.

Said Donald Trump in a statement last night: “The fired agent who was just escorted out of the FBI headquarters is the person who got the FBI to do a Raid on a home, Mar-a-Lago, that has ‘stirred’ the World and created anger and hostility toward the FBI and DOJ the likes of which has perhaps never been seen in our Country before.”

The former president is right, but the departure of Thibault isn’t the end of it — far from it. There’s plenty of oversight yet to be done. Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson continue their work in the Senate, and Congressman Jim Jordan continues his work in the House. And whistleblowers keep beating a path to their doors. If Republicans can get their act together and retake one or both houses on November 8, next January will bring an entirely new level of much-needed scrutiny to the FBI and the Biden Justice Department.