FBI ran secret operation to extinguish Biden family foreign influence scandal: Declassified documents

The FBI ran a secret operation to discredit corruption allegations against the Biden family as “Russian disinformation,” including allegations that Hunter Biden accepted money from Ukrainian interests in exchange for influence, according to intelligence documents declassified by the Trump White House.

A newly released summary report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence says the covert counterintelligence operation, code-named “Round River,” began ahead of the 2020 election around December 2019, notably during President Donald Trump’s first impeachment proceedings on Democrat-initiated charges that he coerced Ukraine into digging up damaging information about his 2020 presidential opponent Joe Biden.

The operational summary, publicly released on Wednesday by the White House Government Transparency Task Force, reveals that Round River’s mission was to retroactively “red flag” intelligence reporting dating back to at least 2015 on the Biden family being compromised by Ukrainian cash.

According to the document, the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force on Russia “unofficially” formed a group of analysts to gather “any/all derogatory information previously reported by confidential human sources (CHSs) on Joseph Biden corruption and other Ukraine related-topics,” including Ukrainian energy firm Burisma Holdings, Hunter Biden, and Ukrainian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

“The team of analysts had administrative accesses to all reporting and drafted intelligence products that were later added to each CHS file to show the reporting was deemed Russian disinformation,” the ODNI summary says.

An operational summary from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Round River, a secret FBI counterintelligence operation intended to dismiss Biden family collusion claims as Russian disinformation. (White House Government Transparency Task Force)

FBI analysts part of the Round River project, per the ODNI summary, highlighted three of the informant files altered after the fact to suggest those longtime sources were spreading Russian disinformation, calling the attached exhibits “an illustrated example of some of the statements made by the aforementioned CHSs with respect to the ‘Ukraine narrative.’”

The “Ukraine narrative” referenced the storyline, accepted and parroted by the legacy media, that the Biden family corruption claims were conspiracy theories, even though more than a dozen confidential human sources shared such claims with the U.S. intelligence community over the span of several years. ODNI’s review says Round River investigators did not determine whether these claims were true over the course of their work. “The Round River team did not corroborate any of the allegations of the ‘Ukraine narrative,’” the ODNI summary says.

Comparatively, the FBI did not seem to consider the possibility of Russian disinformation in Crossfire Hurricane, the FBI investigation into alleged collusion between Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and Russia. According to declassified documents from the Crossfire Hurricane files, the bureau pursued unsubstantiated allegations — propagated by Democrats — that Trump and his allies conspired with the Russian government to hijack the 2016 election, even though, as a Biden-era Justice Department report later confirmed, there was no probable cause to have mounted that investigation in the first place.

“The speed and manner in which the FBI opened and investigated Crossfire Hurricane during the presidential election season [was] based on raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence,” concluded special counsel John Durham, the prosecutor appointed to investigate the commencement of Crossfire Hurricane.

DURHAM REPORT: FBI AND DOJ HAD NO PROPER BASIS TO LAUNCH TRUMP-RUSSIA INVESTIGATION

Among the amended Round River files, the declassified ODNI slide deck shows that confidential U.S. intelligence sources had for years, beginning in 2015, submitted tips about Ukrainian actors seeking influence in the United States by way of Hunter Biden, whose father was still vice president at the time.

One source reported that a Russian intelligence officer told them that Ukrainian businessman Mykola Zlochevsky was “using his relationship with Hunter Biden to get closer to the Americans.” According to the source, the Russian agent referred to the relationship between Zlochevsky, the founder of Burisma, and Hunter Biden, who sat on Burisma’s board collecting roughly $1 million per year, as “a long-term operation/long penetration.”

Zlochevsky was facing investigations into his business practices and actively looked for ways to make the scrutiny go away, including through bribes.

Another informant reported that Burisma issued fake consulting contracts that were paid out to U.S. investors. “Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, have money invested into Burisma. Their investment was passed through a shelf company in Latvia,” the informant file says.

President Joe Biden, wearing a Team USA jacket and walking with his son Hunter Biden, heads toward Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, July 26, 2024. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

House oversight committee investigators later found that Hunter Biden did indeed route his money through a network of shell companies during his time working for overseas interests.

As the ODNI summary indicates, the Round River team dismissed the information from the three informants, whose work with the U.S. intelligence community long preceded their Biden-Burisma tips, as Russian noise.

At least 14 confidential sources flagged by the Round River team were providing “derogatory information on Joe Biden,” FBI Director Kash Patel wrote in a letter obtained by Just the News.

“At my direction, this FBI will take the unprecedented step of providing [the White House Government Transparency Task Force] with the source reporting from all 53 sources so you can finally see the facts,” Patel promised, citing 53 total sources identified by Round River.

Patel added that he “immediately disbanded” the Foreign Influence Task Force, which was embedded at FBI headquarters in the bureau’s Counterintelligence Division, upon assuming the role of FBI director and is internally investigating its past work regarding Round River.

A six-page spreadsheet, also published on Wednesday by the White House as part of the Round River release, shows that the FBI and U.S. spy agencies under ODNI compiled a list of 76 subjects of interest, many of whom became prominent figures in the Biden family foreign influence-peddling scandal and the 2019 impeachment proceedings against Trump.

The list contained the names of various organizations, news outlets, foreign actors, and U.S. politicians, with accompanying designations seemingly categorizing them along partisan lines.

As part of Round River, a spreadsheet was compiled of figures who were categorized into two designations: “conduits” and “targets” of Russian disinformation. (White House Government Transparency Task Force)

Republican allies, such as former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and right-leaning media like Fox News, were classified as “conduits” for circulating Russian propaganda, while Democrats, including both Joe and Hunter Biden, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and George Soros, as well as their associated foundations, were all marked as “targets,” or victims of a disinformation campaign.

Two of Trump’s first-term Cabinet officials, former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr and then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, were labeled as “conduits” by the FBI, as were top GOP leaders Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), Ron Johnson (R-WI), and Lindsey Graham (R-SC), alongside Reps. Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Devin Nunes (R-CA), now chairman of Trump’s intelligence advisory board. All of the Republican lawmakers branded as “conduits” had held or currently hold ranking positions on congressional committees that have at some point probed suspicions surrounding the Biden family’s foreign business dealings.

The purpose of the spreadsheet, according to the file’s title, was to identify potential candidates for “defensive briefings,” which are supposed to be warnings provided in an informational meeting between national security or intelligence agencies and the intended marks to alert them that they are targets of foreign influence or espionage.

Patel expressed concerns in his letter to the White House transparency task force that defensive briefings to members of Congress centered almost exclusively on claims concerning the Ukrainian influence-peddling scheme. “We remain concerned that defensive briefings to Congress may have been overly focused on just Biden and Ukraine rather than the balanced picture of all foreign threats,” Patel wrote.

In the ODNI slide deck, the documents say the Round River team gave defensive briefings to “any Congressional member who obtained reporting related to any aspect of the ‘Ukraine narrative.’”

Grassley, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Johnson, formerly chairman of the Senate homeland security committee, previously suspected that the FBI conducted a defense briefing with them in 2020 as a means of countersignaling their Biden-Burisma probe. “This briefing was done because of political pressure from Democratic Leadership, not because of any real threat,” the senators told the DOJ’s inspector general, calling such unsolicited FBI meetings “a political trap.”

FBI ran secret operation to extinguish Biden family foreign influence scandal: Declassified documents

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