Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) is demanding that the DOJ and the Director of National Intelligence release a series of documents on the Biden family.
In a letter sent to Attorney General Todd Blanche, FBI Director Kash Patel, and Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton, Grassley and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) revealed that records obtained by Grassley’s office suggest the FBI “misclassified information” to hinder congressional probes into Operation Round River, an operation that sought to block negative information on the Bidens ahead of the 2020 election.
“Recently, we’ve obtained possession of a December 2019 email from Tony Riedlinger, then an FBI Section Chief, to FBI Supervisory Special Agent Joe Pientka. That email contains a description as well as an attached document that should be declassified to the fullest extent possible under the law,” the letter says. “The records, when read together, appear to corroborate existing public evidence that President Trump was the target of a political hit and the basis of evidence that would lead a person to reasonably make that conclusion appears to have been known to the Justice Department and FBI for some time. And, if it were not known, that knowledge blind spot demands explanation.”
Discussing Operation Round River, the senators wrote that it “appears 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.”
“In addition, some Round River documents include banner markings to identify classified information; however, the banner markings include ‘Round River’ as a classification code,” the letter adds. “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. If that’s not the case, please provide clarification.”
Operation Round River targeted journalists, Trump administration officials, and members of Congress. A declassified spreadsheet on the matter found the labeling of Russian “conduits” to be partisan. Figures like the Bidens, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Barack Obama and George Soros were considered “targets,” while conservatives such as Michael Caputo, Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, Mike Pompeo, Bill Bar, and Sens. Chuck Grassley, Ron Johnson, and Lindsey Graham, as well as Reps. Devin Nunes and Jim Jordan were “conduits.”
