House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan says newly declassified documents prove the FBI ran a secret counterintelligence operation during the 2020 election not to protect national security, but to protect Joe Biden's presidential campaign, and to silence the lawmakers investigating his family.
Jordan, the Ohio Republican who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, laid out the accusation in a television interview after a tranche of intelligence records became public this week. The documents include an FBI spreadsheet that sorted more than seventy prominent Americans and organizations into two columns: Democrats labeled as "targets" of Russian disinformation, and conservatives labeled as "conduits" spreading it. A letter from FBI Director Kash Patel and a declassified 2025 intelligence community memo accompanied the release, both raising alarms that the bureau's analysts may have put politics ahead of legitimate security work.
The operation at the center of the controversy is codenamed "Round River." It was run out of the FBI's Foreign Influence Task Force at bureau headquarters and launched during the 2020 election cycle. Its stated purpose was to counter "malign foreign influence." But Jordan, who was himself listed in the spreadsheet as a so-called conduit of Russian disinformation, says the real purpose was something else entirely.
"This wasn't an investigation that was being run by the FBI and the intel community. This was an operation, an operation, I think, to protect Joe Biden as he was running for president."
The spreadsheet, recovered from U.S. intelligence agency files and made public by the White House Government Transparency Task Force, lists more than six dozen organizations, Americans, and foreigners connected to the Biden family's Ukraine dealings and the 2019 Trump impeachment proceedings. Democrats, including Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Barack Obama, and George Soros, appear on the "target" side, meaning the FBI treated them as victims of Russian disinformation campaigns.
Conservatives landed on the other side of the ledger. Attorney General Bill Barr, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Senators Chuck Grassley, Ron Johnson, and Lindsey Graham, former House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes, Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, filmmaker Michael Caputo, Fox News, One America News, and Jordan himself were all classified as "conduits", people allegedly amplifying Russian propaganda. The FBI's Foreign Influence Task Force concurred with every assessment on the spreadsheet, marking each with a "no objection" designation.
The documents do not identify how many of the Americans listed actually received defensive briefings from the FBI. Jordan confirmed he was one who did. In 2020, bureau officials sat him down and told him the Biden corruption allegations he was investigating were really Russian disinformation.
Jordan did not buy it then, and he is not buying it now.
"That was BS. That's what we were thinking."
Asked directly whether he believes Round River was designed to obstruct congressional investigators, Jordan was unequivocal: "I do. I think they were trying to get us to be quiet."
FBI Director Kash Patel's letter to the White House Government Transparency Task Force, also released this week, added a critical detail. The bureau has identified at least fourteen confidential informants who were providing derogatory information about the Biden family. Confidential human sources had been reporting concerns as early as 2015 that Ukraine was possibly targeting the future first family for influence.
Rather than pursue those leads on the merits, the Washington Examiner reported that FBI analysts retroactively altered informant files to label longtime credible sources as spreaders of Russian disinformation, without actually corroborating or disproving their claims. An intelligence community summary described how "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."
In his letter, Patel did not hold back about the scope of the problem. He wrote that the bureau is "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." He added that the FBI 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."
Patel has since terminated the Foreign Influence Task Force. Its activities are now under formal investigation. He pledged the bureau is "firmly committed to identifying, investigating and holding accountable all abuses" that occurred during Round River and to ensuring "that future counterintelligence operations remain focused exclusively on legitimate foreign threats and are never used to advance political narratives."
As previously reported, the full scope of the FBI's handling of those fourteen informants has raised pointed questions about whether the bureau actively suppressed evidence of Biden family corruption rather than simply failing to act on it.
The third document released this week, a 2025 Director of National Intelligence memo, now declassified, reinforced Jordan's allegations. The intelligence community review found that FBI analysts did not determine whether the Ukraine-related allegations against the Biden family were true before dismissing them as Russian propaganda. The memo raised concerns that Round River was used as a political tool to neutralize an alleged corruption narrative about Biden rather than to address genuine national security threats.
Jordan connected that finding to a broader pattern. He pointed to the 51 former intelligence officials who signed a letter during the 2020 campaign claiming Hunter Biden's laptop had "all the classic earmarks" of a Russian disinformation operation.
"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."
Hunter Biden has continued to deny key elements of the laptop story. In a recent interview with Tucker Carlson, he denied dropping off the laptop at a Delaware repair shop, a claim that sits uneasily alongside the FBI's own authenticated possession of the device.
Jordan cast Round River as the continuation of a pattern that stretched back years, from the Crossfire Hurricane probe, which pursued allegations that Trump and his allies conspired with Russia to influence the 2016 election, to a separate FBI investigation codenamed "Oxferd Comma." Documents released earlier this month revealed that Oxferd Comma, opened in 2017, alleged the newly elected president may have been acting as a Russian asset when he fired FBI Director James Comey.
Jordan described the through line plainly:
"It was 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 has already taken one concrete step. He referred former CIA Director John Brennan for possible prosecution for lying to Congress in connection with the Russia collusion allegations. The referral signals that the Judiciary Committee chairman intends to pursue individual accountability, not just institutional reform.
He also expressed strong confidence in newly confirmed Attorney General Todd Blanche. The Senate confirmed Blanche earlier this year in a razor-thin vote, and Jordan appears to view him as the right person to follow the evidence wherever Round River leads.
"I have been very impressed with Todd Blanche, the best Attorney General I've ever worked with," Jordan said. "I do believe he is committed to getting to the truth and holding people accountable."
Several questions remain unanswered. The FBI's internal review of the Foreign Influence Task Force is not yet complete. It is unclear how many Americans on the spreadsheet actually received defensive briefings, or what specific evidence underlies Jordan's referral of Brennan. The broader pattern of Biden-era officials suppressing inconvenient information, from whistleblower complaints to intelligence assessments, continues to widen as more documents reach daylight.
One disclosure matters here: John Solomon, who reported this story for Just the News, is on leave from the outlet while serving as chairman of the White House Government Transparency Task Force, the same body that released the spreadsheet. Solomon's own name appeared in that spreadsheet as a potential "conduit" of Russian disinformation. He holds the task force role as an unpaid special government employee.
What the declassified record shows so far is an FBI that took real intelligence from real informants, stamped it with a political label, and used it not to protect the country but to steer an election and shut down the people asking hard questions. If that does not warrant accountability, it is difficult to imagine what would.
