Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, is alleging that the FBI intentionally misclassified information to conceal evidence of Biden family corruption, pointing to a newly discovered anomaly in classification coding tied to a secretive investigation known as “Operation Round River.”
In a letter sent Monday to Attorney General Todd Blanche, FBI Director Kash Patel, and Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton, Grassley detailed what he called misconduct uncovered in connection with the FBI investigation, which whistleblowers claim was used to improperly discredit negative information about Hunter Biden as disinformation and shut down investigative activity.
What Is Operation Round River?
Round River was the name of an investigation run out of FBI headquarters in conjunction with the Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF). According to whistleblower accounts, the FITF used the investigation to seek out confidential human source (CHS) holdings at FBI field offices across the country relating to the Biden family and falsely label them as foreign disinformation. Sources familiar with the operation told The Federalist that at one point the FBI maintained over 40 confidential human sources who provided criminal information relating to Joe Biden, James Biden, and Hunter Biden.
The operation was also described as seeking to scuttle investigative leads into Biden family corruption by discrediting them as Russian disinformation.
The Classification Anomaly
In his letter, Grassley revealed that the records related to Round River showed the intelligence community used its resources to downgrade allegations of criminality relating to the Biden family without sufficient investigation. Additionally, the intelligence community created a list of supposed “conduits” of disinformation related to evidence implicating the Biden family in Ukrainian corruptionāa list that included then-Attorney General William Barr.
More significantly, Grassley noted that some Round River documents include banner markings to identify classified information, but the banner markings include “Round River” as a classification code. He said it appears the FBI, under former Director Christopher Wray, treated Round River as a Special Access Program (SAP), even though all accounts provided so far show no indication that it was actually designated as such.
The intelligence community’s classification system requires documents to be marked as Top Secret, Secret, Confidential, or Unclassified. A banner at the top begins with the appropriate classification category, followed by two forward slashes and then various markings such as “FOUO” (For Official Use Only) or “NOFORN” (Not Releasable to Foreign Nationals).
Notably, “Round River” does not appear in the register of “Authorized Classification and Control Markings.” When a document falls within a Special Access Program, agents include a designation like “SAR-Name” in the banner. The FOIA release of the register includes an example of a document marked “Top Secret” with the designation “SAR-BP” for a program named “Butter Popcorn.”
But according to Grassley’s letter, Round River documents did not include a proper SAP designation, yet the banner still included the investigation name. To Grassley, that suggests agents may have treated the investigation as an SAP without official authorizationāa serious concern because SAPs limit access not only within the FBI but also to only a few select senators and representatives who receive briefings. If Round River was treated as an SAP, Grassley’s many oversight requests for relevant documents could be ignored. High-level approval is required to run an SAP, and Grassley asks for clarification on whether that approval was ever given.
Previous Findings
This development follows Grassley’s earlier discovery that the FBI, under Director Wray, hid documents related to the Crossfire Hurricane investigation by using the “Prohibited Access” functionality of the Sentinel case management system. That designation rendered documents invisible to agents searching the FBI database.
According to The Federalist, it now appears the FBI had multiple ways of disappearing evidenceāboth evidence that inculpated the Bidens and exculpated Trump. Grassley’s letter is the latest in a series of oversight efforts aimed at uncovering the extent of the bureau’s alleged misconduct.
Source: thefederalist.com ā https://thefederalist.com/2026/08/19/round-river-docs-suggest-fbi-misclassified-information-to-hide-biden-family-crimes/