Newly declassified documents show the FBI ran a secret counterintelligence operation during the 2020 election that labeled sitting Republican lawmakers, cabinet officials, and conservative media outlets as "conduits" of Russian disinformation, and House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan says the whole thing was designed to protect Joe Biden.
Jordan, the Ohio Republican who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, laid out his case in a wide-ranging interview with Just the News, reacting to a trove of intelligence records made public this week by the White House Government Transparency Task Force. The documents reveal that a team of FBI analysts inside the bureau's Foreign Influence Task Force launched an operation codenamed "Round River" and built a spreadsheet sorting more than six dozen Americans and organizations into two categories: "targets" of Russian disinformation, and "conduits" who allegedly spread it.
Democrats, including the Bidens, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Kerry, and George Soros, landed in the "target" column. Conservatives filled the other side. Fox News, One America News, Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, filmmaker Michael Caputo, then-Attorney General Bill Barr, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Senators Chuck Grassley, Ron Johnson, and Lindsey Graham, and House committee chairmen Devin Nunes and Jordan himself were all classified as "conduits." The FBI's Foreign Influence Task Force, based at bureau headquarters, signed off on every assessment with a "no objection" designation.
The scope of the operation goes beyond a spreadsheet. The Washington Examiner reported that Round River began in December 2019 and was designed to retroactively "red flag" intelligence reporting that dated back to 2015, years of confidential source flagging concerns about Biden family corruption and ties to Ukrainian energy firm Burisma. FBI analysts altered confidential human source files after the fact, inserting intelligence products that labeled legitimate reporting as Russian disinformation. They did so without first investigating whether the underlying claims were true.
An Office of the Director of National Intelligence summary described the mechanics plainly: analysts had administrative access to all reporting and drafted intelligence products that were later added to each source file to show the reporting was "deemed Russian disinformation."
At least 53 confidential sources had flagged derogatory information on Joe Biden. Fourteen of those informants specifically provided information about his alleged corruption, according to an FBI letter made public this week. Confidential human sources working for the FBI and other agencies had been reporting concerns about Ukraine possibly targeting the Biden family for influence as far back as 2015.
FBI Director Kash Patel, in a letter to the White House Government Transparency Task Force, confirmed the bureau is investigating whether the task force weaponized Round River against its own sources:
"While our internal review of the FITF is not yet complete, we are investigating whether the FITF used information learned from the Round River assessment to undermine or influence ongoing investigations by only focusing on the subset of CHS's (Confidential Human Sources) involving the Bidens."
Patel also raised a pointed concern about the FBI's congressional outreach during that period. The bureau gave defensive briefings to lawmakers, including Jordan, warning them that the Biden corruption allegations they were investigating amounted to Russian disinformation. Patel stated the bureau remains "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."
Jordan did not hold back about what the briefings meant. He recalled receiving his own defensive briefing from the FBI in 2020 and said he saw through it immediately.
"That was BS. That's what we were thinking."
Asked whether Round River and the briefings amounted to an effort to obstruct Congress, Jordan was direct: "I do. I think they were trying to get us to be quiet."
He framed the operation as part of a broader institutional pattern, one that stretched across FBI leadership and deep into the intelligence community. Jordan pointed to the letter signed by 51 former intelligence officials during the 2020 campaign that characterized Hunter Biden's laptop as Russian disinformation, even though the FBI already had the laptop and knew it was authentic.
"You can see it in the bigger scheme where it was the 51 former Intel officials who did that crazy letter saying the laptop was Russian disinformation... when in fact they had it, and they knew it was already his laptop, and they knew it was authentic for goodness' sake."
Jordan tied Round River to a continuous thread running from the early days of the Trump presidency through the 2020 election. He called it "an operation to, I believe, continue this effort that we saw from the Wray FBI, and before that the Comey FBI, and others in the intel community to hurt President Trump and, in this case, help presidential candidate and then, you know, future President Biden."
Jordan's characterization finds support in a declassified 2025 memo from the Director of National Intelligence. That review raised concerns that FBI analysts put politics over national security during Round River. The memo found that analysts did not determine whether the Ukraine-related allegations against Biden were true before dismissing them as Russian propaganda, and concluded that the operation may have been used as a political tool to neutralize an alleged corruption narrative rather than address genuine national security threats.
Patel has since terminated the Foreign Influence Task Force entirely. Its activities remain under active investigation. In his letter, Patel pledged the bureau is "firmly committed to identifying, investigating and holding accountable all abuses" from Round River and to ensuring "that future counterintelligence operations remain focused exclusively on legitimate foreign threats and are never used to advance political narratives."
He also took an unprecedented step, telling the task force: "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."
The Round River revelations land alongside a separate set of documents released by the White House earlier this month that exposed another FBI operation, this one codenamed "Oxferd Comma." That investigation, opened in 2017, alleged that newly elected President Trump may have been acting as a Russian asset when he fired then-FBI Director James Comey. The bureau's own evidence at the time overwhelmingly showed no collusion with the Kremlin.
The pattern is consistent. In one case after another, declassified records have shown federal investigators and intelligence officials reaching conclusions that served political ends before the evidence justified those conclusions, or actively working to suppress evidence that cut the wrong way. Similar dynamics surfaced in declassified memos showing Biden officials diverted a whistleblower complaint alleging a senior official lied to Congress.
Jordan has also referred former CIA Director John Brennan for possible prosecution, alleging Brennan lied to Congress in connection with the Russia collusion narrative. The current status of that referral remains unclear.
Meanwhile, Jordan expressed confidence in Attorney General Todd Blanche, calling him "the best Attorney General I've ever worked with."
"I do believe he is committed to getting to the truth and holding people accountable."
Several questions remain unanswered. The documents released so far do not show how many of the 70-plus individuals on the spreadsheet ultimately received defensive briefings, or whether any were notified they had been labeled "conduits." The formal authorization chain for Round River, who approved it, and under what authority, has not been disclosed. And the full scope of what those 14 confidential informants reported about the Bidens, beyond the general description of "derogatory" information, remains behind classification walls that Patel has pledged to open.
When a law enforcement agency spends more energy discrediting its own sources than investigating the conduct those sources reported, it has stopped doing law enforcement. It has started doing politics.
