FBI had 14 informants on Biden corruption but ran secret op to dismiss evidence as disinformation

Bureau secretly flagged Cabinet officials like Bill Barr and Mike Pompeo, lawmakers and journalists as ‘conduits’ for Russia propaganda.

By John Solomon and Steven Richards

Published: August 12, 2026 6:06am

Updated: August 12, 2026 6:16am

The FBI and U.S. spy agencies received derogatory evidence about Joe Biden from 14 different informants but embarked on a secret operation to tamp down a Ukrainian corruption scandal engulfing his family during the 2020 election by formally designating Attorney General Bill Barr, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, key members of Congress and journalists as Russian disinformation “conduits,” according to explosive intelligence community documents declassified by the White House.

A spreadsheet that was recovered from U.S. intelligence agency files and made public Wednesday by the White House Government Transparency Task Force shows that spy agencies and the FBI created a list of more than six dozen prominent organizations, Americans or foreigners who became figures in the Biden family Ukraine scandal and the 2019 impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump.

The spreadsheet neatly divided figures along political lines, with Democrats like the Bidens, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Barack Obama and George Soros listed as victimized “targets” of Russian disinformation and conservatives like Fox News, One America News, filmmaker Michael Caputo and Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani as “conduits” for disinformation.

The FBI also labeled two of President Donald Trump’s first-term Cabinet secretaries, Pompeo and Barr, as well as Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley, Ron Johnson and Lindsey Graham and House GOP committee chairmen Devin Nunes and Jim Jordan as “conduits” even while they all investigated whether the allegations of corruption against the Biden family were true.

You can read the spreadsheet below:

File

Defensive Briefing Spreadsheet.pdf

The designations were part of a secret counterintelligence operation codenamed “Round River” that was launched during the 2020 election by a task force of FBI analysts claiming to be fighting “malign foreign influence” in the 2020 election, according to an administration official.

The Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), based in FBI headquarters, concurred with each of the assessments in the spreadsheet with a “no objection” designation, the documents state.

Many of the Americans were identified as potential candidates for defensive briefings, though the spreadsheets and documents found so far do not identify how many Americans ultimately were given such briefings.

In some ways, the Round River operation is a mirror opposite of the Russia collusion probe known as Crossfire Hurricane in which the FBI pursued unsubstantiated allegations spread by Democrats that Trump and his allies conspired with Vladimir Putin to hijack the 2016 election. In Round River, FBI analysts sought to dismiss significant evidence in the bureau's possession, including Hunter Biden's own laptop, pointing to possible corruption by the Bidens.

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>FBI had 14 informants on Biden corruption but ran secret op to dismiss evidence as disinformation

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 then-Director James Comey even though the bureau’s own evidence overwhelmingly showed at the time there was no collusion with the Kremlin.

Remarkably, the effort to portray the Biden scandal as Russian disinformation came even though confidential human sources working for the FBI and other agencies began reporting a steady stream of concerns starting in 2015 that Ukraine was possibly targeting the future first family for influence, the memos show. The FBI has identified at least 14 informants who were providing derogatory information on the Bidens, according to an FBI letter made public Wednesday.

In that letter to the White House Government Transparency Task Force, FBI Director Kash Patel said the Foreign Influence Task Force was terminated on his watch and its activities are now under investigation.

He said he shared concerns cited in a 2025 Director of National Intelligence memo declassified on Wednesday that Round River was used as a political tool to neutralize an alleged corruption narrative about Biden, the Democrats' 2020 presidential nominee, rather than to address true national security threats.

“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 wrote, according to the letter reviewed by Just the News.

“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,” he added.

Patel said the bureau is “firmly committed to identifying, investigating and holding accountable all abuses” that occurred during the Round River operation and to ensure “that future counterintelligence operations remain focused exclusively on legitimate foreign threats and are never used to advance political narratives.”

File

Round River Statement from FBI.pdf

While the Round River operation was based in FBI headquarters, it directed actions by several field offices, including the FBI’s Pittsburgh office, just doors away from the U.S. attorney named by Barr to investigate allegations by one of those confidential human sources who had been providing intelligence for years that a Ukrainian energy executive named Mykola Zlochevsky and his Burisma Holdings Company were compromising the Bidens with lucrative consulting monies to Hunter Biden, the memos show.

Biden presidential campaign and legacy media aligned with the efforts to portray the Burisma allegations as "conspiracy theories"

Just the News first reported on the existence of the Round River probe in March as one of four codenamed probes targeting President Donald Trump and his supporters. The operation initially targeted Trump’s lawyer and former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani for his efforts to investigate Hunter Biden’s and Joe Biden’s exploits in Ukraine but expanded to look at numerous public figures who spoke out about Biden family corruption concerns.

Grassley, the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, and Johnson, the Senate Budget Committee chairman, have been investigating the Round River operation for years and have raised concerns the FBI may have used a 2020 defensive briefing to them as a way of thwarting their probe into Burisma and Biden family corruption allegations.

In essence, the FBI Foreign Influence Task Force operation treated Barr’s investigation into the Biden controversy as a potential disinformation threat, closely aligning with the Biden presidential campaign’s and legacy media’s efforts to portray the Burisma allegations as "conspiracy theories."

That conspiracy theory storyline referred to in the documents as the "Ukraine narrative" persisted well beyond the 2020 election that put Biden into the White House until two IRS whistleblowers and some former Biden business partners came forward to Congress beginning in 2023 and shared evidence that Hunter Biden had committed crimes, including failing to pay taxes on monies he earned from Burisma, and sought to use his father’s influence to help the Ukrainian energy company Burisma.

Hunter Biden would eventually be convicted of tax and gun crimes before his father pardoned him, and legacy media would eventually pivot and be forced to acknowledge the corruption concerns from 2020 were real as Congress produced evidence of Joe Biden’s complicity with his son and business partners and the first family’s collection of millions of dollars from foreign interests.

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An impeachment probe by the House Oversight Committee ultimately concluded in August 2024 that Joe Biden engaged in impeachable conduct by helping to enrich his family with millions of dollars in business schemes that traded on his name and then defrauded voters by lying to cover up the scandal. The committee specifically cited meetings between Biden and his son’s Ukrainian business partners, arguing the president “actively participated” in an influence-peddling conspiracy.

But, before that investigation laid bare the evidence, the FBI used its Round River operation to neutralize or sideline the allegations and the players assisting the investigations, even going so far as to denigrate three long-term informants by altering their confidential human source files to suggest they were perpetrators of Russian disinformation, the newly declassified memos sho.

A 2025 summary about the Round River operation written by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and released by the White House on Wednesday shows the team of agents revisited significant intelligence reporting dating to 2012 that the Biden family may have been compromised by Ukrainian corruption, and belatedly flagged it as “Russian disinformation.”

“The Round River team did not corroborate any of the allegations of the ‘Ukraine narrative,’” the DNI summary concluded.

You can read the DNI summary here:

File

DELTA Project Slide Deck.pdf

The intelligence review pinpointed the start of Round River to December 2019, just as Trump’s Ukraine impeachment proceedings were raging, and gave a succinct description of its mission.

“Around December 2019, the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force – Russia (FITF-R) unofficially formed a group of analysts who utilized internal systems to gather any/all derogatory information previously reported by confidential human sources (CHSs) on Joseph Biden corruption and other Ukraine-related topics (known as the Ukraine narrative) including Burisma, Hunter Biden, Mykola Zlochevsky, Ukraine interference in 2016 US presidential election to red flag the reporting as Russian disinformation,” the DNI report said.

Remarkably, the DNI report alleges, the Round River team amended each of three informant files to portray their long-term reporting as false.

“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 DNI memo stated. “The FITF-R team also provided defensive briefings to any Congressional member who obtained reporting related to any aspect of the Ukraine narrative.”

What follows are summaries of the evidence that the three FBI and spy agency informants had been giving for years about concerns of Biden family corruption.

One informant, whose work dated to 2012, began reporting concerns as early as 2015 about the intentions of Burisma and Zlochevsky with the Bidens after the company hired Hunter Biden to its board while his father was still vice president.

"CHS knows a Russian Intelligence Officer (JO) who told the CHS that Mykola Zlochevsky […] is using his relationship with Hunter Biden to get closer to the Americans,” the DNI summary memo stated. "The IO referred to the relationship between Zlochevsky and Biden as a long-term operation/long penetration."

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A second informant whose work began in 2017 and continued through 2022 reported the Biden targeting was part of a larger corruption scheme in Ukraine where Burisma purportedly paid figures through fake contracts.

"Zlochevsky had an INTERPOL investigation on him. He allegedly paid Poroshenko $100,000,000 to stop the case against him. The bribe was in the form of shares and guaranteed profits from gas sales in Ukraine. According to [a protected sub-source], two CIA officers took Zlochevsky into the office of Yuriy Lutsenko, who was the prosecutor general of Ukraine. The CIA officers allegedly said Zlochevsky is protected by the U.S. and urged Lutsenko to stop the investigation on Zlochevsky and let him back into Ukraine,” the DNI summary stated.

Evidence against Bidens repeatedly dismissed as "Russian disinformation"

“Burisma Holdings owns thirteen companies, which are used to pay dividends on investments through fake consulting contracts. 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 shelf company in Latvia,” it added.

A third confidential human source, according to the DNI memo, purportedly had direct access to Hunter Biden and had discussions about alleged Burisma corruption. The source had been working on and off for the government since 2008 and provided his Biden intelligence in October 2019 right as Trump was being impeached by the Democratic-run House.

“CHS discussed his relationship with Hunter Biden, who consulted CHS before he decided to work for Burisma. CHS also mentioned that approximately one year prior, Yuri Boyko could get access to the Ukrainian government investigation into Burisma and Boyko offered the information to the CHS,” the DNI summary stated. “CHS discussed how they sat down with those who had previously offered the CHS the Burisma dossier and requested a copy.”

Despite such extensive reporting, the FBI Round River team marked all three confidential human sources after the fact as being resources of Russian disinformation.

https://justthenews.com/index%2ephp/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/emb6am-fbi-marked-officials-journalists-informants