(Luis Cornelio, Headline USA) The FBI under embattled Director Chris Wray may have classified files pertaining to its task force findings against Joe and Hunter Biden ahead of the 2020 election, two Republican senators implied in Monday letters to the DOJ.
Sens. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Ron Johnson, R-Wis., made the allegations in letters to Attorney General Todd Blanche, FBI Director Kash Patel and Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton, according to the New York Post. Specifically, the senators questioned whether the Wray-led FBI misclassified the files in a bid to obstruct congressional investigators or a future administration from accessing them.
The letter centers on Operation Round River, an FBI task force designed to gather information about the Biden family that could potentially counter foreign interference in the 2020 presidential election. The gathered information was reportedly used to inform agents of allegations foreign countries may use to undermine the race and not to criminally investigate the Bidens.
While the White House, Grassley and Johnson have released some documents pertaining to the probe, the Republican lawmakers wrote that “the available records cause serious concerns about how federal law enforcement and the Intelligence Community used its resources to downgrade allegations of criminality relating to the Biden family apparently without sufficient investigation.”
“The records also cause concern about how federal records were stored and managed,” they added in the letter, which Headline USA has reviewed.
Grassley and Johnson cited an email from FBI Supervisory Special Agent Michael DeLauro in which he said, “We apologize for the classification caveats but our OGC has directed us to classify our work this way based on past experience with Crossfire Hurricane.”
The lawmakers said that the email implied that “the Wray FBI intentionally misclassified information a certain way which would result in more obstacles to obtaining access, whether it be Congress or the American people who sought it.”
Some of the Round River files included banner markings to identify classified material alongside “Round River” as a code, an unusual step that Grassley and Johnson said suggested wrongdoing. “Accordingly, it appears the Wray FBI treated Round River as a Special Access Program when all accounts provided to us so far show no indication that it was in fact such a program,” they continued.
The letter makes clear that Blanche is expected to provide clarification about those steps as the DOJ continues to work with lawmakers to shed light on the operations of the department and the FBI in the years after President Donald Trump left the White House in 2021.
Among the Round River files released by the White House and reviewed by Headline USA include a spreadsheet with the names of prominent conservative journalists who may serve as “conduits” of the potential foreign misinformation campaign.
The Round River files themselves make clear that the information against the Biden family was obtained through the FBI’s own confidential human sources, or CHSs, though the bureau later claimed it never corroborated any of the allegations.
Allegations of public corruption pertaining to Ukraine and Joe Biden’s tenure as vice president under the Obama administration were among the information mentioned.
In a “scope” description, the FBI wrote: “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.”
This is a developing story.
