Kash Patel Disbands FBI Task Force Over Secret Biden Operation

The White House Government Transparency Task Force released declassified documents exposing a secret FBI counterintelligence operation codenamed Round River. Running from December 2019 through the 2020 election, the operation was conducted by the FBI's Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF) to categorize derogatory information regarding Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, and Burisma Holdings as Russian disinformation.

Kash Patel, the current FBI Director, has since disbanded the task force and launched an internal investigation to determine who authorized the operation. Patel is investigating whether the FITF used the operation to undermine investigations into the Bidens by focusing only on a subset of confidential human sources. He has ordered the FBI to provide the White House Government Transparency Task Force with source reporting from all 53 sources identified by the operation.

Documents show the FBI maintained a spreadsheet that categorized individuals into targets and conduits. Democrats, including Joe Biden and Barack Obama, were listed as targets or victims of disinformation. Conversely, Republicans such as Bill Barr and Mike Pompeo, along with media outlets like Fox News, were labeled as conduits for Russian propaganda. A review by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence found that the Round River team failed to corroborate the Ukraine-related allegations they flagged as disinformation, despite reports of corruption and shell company investments in Latvia.