Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) has demanded the Justice Department and Office of the Director of National Intelligence release a trove of documents that were apparently “misclassified” to “downgrade” alleged wrongdoing by former President Joe Biden’s family.In a Monday letter, Grassley and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) revealed that records obtained by Grassley’s office indicated the FBI “misclassified information” to obstruct congressional inquiries into Operation Round River, a bureau task force that compiled derogatory information on Joe and Hunter Biden in the lead-up to the 2020 election.
“To-date, 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,” Grassley and Johnson wrote to Attorney General Todd Blanche, FBI Director Kash Patel and Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton.
“The records also cause concern about how federal records were stored and managed,” the lawmakers added.
The letter referenced an undated email from a FBI supervisory special agent that mentioned “classification caveats” requested by the agency’s Office of General Counsel “based on past experience with Crossfire Hurricane,” the 2016 investigation into whether the Trump campaign illegally colluded with Russian officials.
Under former Director Christopher Wray, the FBI apparently “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,” the Republicans charged.Grassley’s office also received other documents indicating the Round River team may have operated as a so-called Special Access Program, the output of which was given high degrees of classification. --->READ MORE HERE
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It now appears the FBI had multiple ways of disappearing evidence — both evidence that inculpated the Bidens and exculpated Trump.
Documents recently obtained by Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, included an anomaly in the classification coding — one that indicates FBI agents intentionally misclassified information to conceal evidence of Biden-family corruption.On Monday, Grassley highlighted the discovery in a letter he penned to Attorney General Todd Blanche, FBI Director Kash Patel, and Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton, about misconduct he has uncovered related to “Operation Round River.” “Round River” was the name of the investigation run out of FBI headquarters, in conjunction with the Foreign Influence Task Force (“FITF”); an investigation whistleblowers claim sought to “improperly discredit negative Hunter Biden information as disinformation and caused investigative activity to cease.”
As The Federalist previously reported, Grassley revealed FITF used the investigation “to seek out CHS holdings at FBI Field Offices across the country relating to the Biden family and falsely discredit them as foreign disinformation.” And “at one point in time the FBI maintained over 40 Confidential Human Sources that provided criminal information relating to Joe Biden, James Biden, and Hunter Biden.” Sources familiar with Round River also told The Federalist “that the investigation sought to scuttle any investigative leads into Biden family corruption by discrediting it as Russia disinformation.”
In his Monday letter, Grassley revealed that the records related to Round River also showed the intelligence community “used its resources to downgrade allegations of criminality relating to the Biden family apparently without sufficient investigation.” And notwithstanding the lack of an appropriate investigation, the intelligence community created a list of supposed “conduits” of disinformation related to evidence implicating the Biden family in Ukrainian corrupt — a list that included then-Attorney General William Barr.
What followed, though, suggests there is much more to come: In his letter, Grassley noted that “some Round River documents include banner markings to identify classified information; however, the banner markings include ‘Round River’ as a classification code.” Grassley continued: “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.”
This narrative proves explosive when one considers the coding used by the intelligence community and FBI. That coding system first requires documents be classification as Top Secret, Secret, Confidential, or Unclassified. A “banner” on top of the document begins with the appropriate classification category. Two front slashes follow the classification, and then various markings, such as “FOUO,” meaning “For Official Use Only” or NOFORN, standing for “Not Releasable to Foreign Nationals.”
Significantly, and unsurprisingly, there is no “Round River” marking in the register of “Authorized Classification and Control Markings.” Conversely, when a document falls within the “Special Access Program,” agents include SAR-Name, with SAR meaning Special Access Required, in the banner. The FOIA release of the Authorized Classification and Control Markings Register provides this example: --->READ MORE HERE
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