The FBI and U.S. spy agencies received derogatory evidence about Joe Biden from 14 different informants but launched a secret 2020 election operation to tamp down the Ukrainian corruption scandal surrounding his family.
The effort formally designated Attorney General Bill Barr, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, key members of Congress, and journalists as Russian disinformation “conduits,” according to declassified intelligence documents released by the White House Government Transparency Task Force.
A recovered spreadsheet divided more than six dozen figures along political lines. Democrats including the Bidens, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Barack Obama, and George Soros were listed as “targets” of Russian disinformation. Conservatives including Fox News, One America News, Michael Caputo, Rudy Giuliani, Barr, Pompeo, Sens. Chuck Grassley, Ron Johnson and Lindsey Graham, and Reps. Devin Nunes and Jim Jordan were labeled “conduits.” Many of those Americans were flagged as potential candidates for defensive briefings.
The designations came from a counterintelligence operation codenamed “Round River,” run by a group of analysts from the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force. The team unofficially formed around December 2019, initially focused on Rudy Giuliani, then expanded. It gathered any and all derogatory information on Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, Burisma, and the so-called “Ukraine narrative,” including evidence from Hunter Biden’s laptop, then red-flagged it as Russian disinformation. The task force concurred with the assessments. In many ways it was the mirror opposite of the Crossfire Hurricane Russia collusion probe.
Round River analysts had administrative access to files and later amended the records of three long-standing confidential human sources who had reported concerns about Biden family corruption dating back years.
Intelligence products were added to each source’s file claiming their reporting was Russian disinformation. Some of those sources were eventually terminated after providing negative intelligence about Ukraine and the Bidens.
The operation also closely aligned with the Biden campaign’s and legacy media’s efforts to label the Burisma allegations as “conspiracy theories.” Sens. Grassley and Johnson have long raised concerns that a 2020 defensive briefing may have been used to thwart their own probe.
A 2025 DNI summary of the “Delta Project” review concluded that the Round River team “did not corroborate any of the allegations of the ‘Ukraine narrative.’” FBI Director Kash Patel has terminated the Foreign Influence Task Force and is investigating whether it was used as a political tool to neutralize the corruption narrative rather than address real national security threats.
