by WorldTribune Staff, August 12, 2026 Non-AI Real World News
A secret FBI operation during the 2020 election season which was codenamed “Round River” systematically categorized intelligence on Biden family corruption as Russian disinformation, according to newly declassified documents.
Released by the White House Government Transparency Task Force on Wednesday, the files show that the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF) appeared to flag negative information concerning Joe Biden’s Ukraine-related dealings to actively neutralize the political scandal.
Operation Round River was initiated in December 2019, the documents show. The counterintelligence operation ran through the 2020 presidential election and had the effect of discrediting internal evidence from the FBI’s own informants.
The documents show the FBI, then under the direction of James Comey, possessed derogatory evidence regarding Joe Biden from 14 different confidential human sources (CHSs) but chose to flag the data as foreign intelligence threats without verifying its factual accuracy.
Other high-profile figures, including Hunter Biden, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and George Soros, were formally designated as “victims” or “targets” of Russian disinformation.
Prominent Republicans and investigative journalists who questioned Biden family finances—such as then-Attorney General Bill Barr, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Rep. Jim Jordan, and Sen. Chuck Grassley — were labeled as “conduits” spreading false Russian narratives.
Current FBI Director Kash Patel has confirmed that he shut down the FITF and its activities.
The operation itself is now under a formal internal investigation by the FBI to determine who authorized the project and how high up the chain of command the directive went.
The documents include a declassified assessment of Round River from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) under Tulsi Gabbard.
According to the ODNI report, “the Round River team did not corroborate any of the allegations of the ‘Ukraine Narrative.’ ”
The Federalist noted, citing a Trump Administration official, that “means that the FITF-R did not even look into whether the Ukraine narrative was true, whether Hunter Biden was getting money from Burisma, or if there was corruption involving Burisma and the State Department,.”
The administration official noted that at the same time Round River was going on was the “same time frame that those 51 intelligence experts write the famous letter about the Biden laptop. And I think in all of those things, the commonality is there wasn’t a concern about whether the Biden laptop was accurate or not. We now know the FBI already had it in its possession that already authenticated the laptop.”
“The same concern is expressed in the ODNI review of 2025 — that this operation didn’t seem to care about whether the information that was being uttered or spread was true,” the official continued. “They were simply interested in stopping its spread or using briefings to get people to stop talking about it.”
One CHS report from February 2019 states “CUB Energy Inc. (CUB) in Texas, is run by Mikhail Afeudkov. CUB was brought public via a reverse merger with a Canadian company. The scheme involves Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, Devon Archer, and Chris Heinz-Kerry. The beneficiaries of CUB are Afeudkov and the former Ukrainian Minister of Ecology, Mykola Zlochevsky.”
“Burisma Holdings owns thirteen companies, which are used to pay dividends on investments through fake consulting contracts,” it continued. “The contracts are paid to US investors and funneled through Latvia and the energy sector of Ukraine. Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, have money invested into Burisma. Their investment was passed through a shell company in Latvia.”
Patel wrote in a letter to the White House task force: “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 involving the Bidens. 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.”
Related — Bobulinski: CCP ‘successfully’ compromised Obama White House through VP Biden, February 13, 2024
“Round River identified at least 53 Confidential Human Sources (CHS) whose identities were potentially known to foreign intelligence and under hostile control,” Patel continued. “At least 14 of these CHSs reported derogatory information on Joe Biden. At my direction, this FBI will take the unprecedented step of providing you with the source reporting from all 53 sources so you can finally see the facts.”
Documents released by the White House earlier this month exposed an investigation in 2017 codenamed “Oxferd Comma” alleging the newly elected president Trump may have been acting as a Russian asset when he fired Comey even though the bureau’s own evidence overwhelmingly showed at the time there was no collusion with the Kremlin.
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