House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan tells Just the News the recently revealed FBI operation known as Round River was an effort to obstruct congressional investigators from getting to the truth about Democrat corruption and to interfere in the 2020 election to help Joe Biden win. “It’s ridiculous what happened, and it’s just wrong,” he declared.”This wasn’t an investigation that was being run by the FBI and the intel community. This was an operation, an operation, I think, to protect Joe Biden as he was running for president,” Jordan said in a wide-ranging interview on the Just the News, No Noise television show.
The powerful committee chairman and Ohio Republican was reacting to news reported Thursday morning that newly declassified documents show the FBI had 14 confidential informants reporting derogatory evidence on Biden during the 2020 election but embarked on an effort to dismiss that evidence of a corrupt Ukrainian energy company enriching his family as “Russian disinformation.”
Dismissed evidence out of hand
One of the documents showed that Jordan was listed by the FBI and spy agencies as “a conduit” of Russian disinformation along with Attorney General Bill Barr, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Sens. Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson, as well as other prominent conservatives.
A 2025 U.S. intelligence community review of the Round River operation raised concerns that FBI analysts put politics over national security and didn’t even bother to determine if the Ukraine allegations were true before dismissing them as Russian propaganda.
Jordan revealed he was given a defensive briefing in 2020 by the FBI suggesting the Biden allegations he was investigating were Russian disinformation and said he found it laughable.
“That was BS. That’s what we were thinking,” he said.
The bigger scheme: “Get us to be quiet”
Asked if he thought the briefing and Round River operation were an effort to obstruct Congress in its investigation of the Biden family, Jordan answered: “I do. I think they were trying to get us to be quiet.”
“You can see it in the bigger scheme where it was the 51 former Intel officials who did that crazy letter saying the (Hunter Biden) laptop was Russian disinformation … when in fact they had it, and they knew it was already his laptop, and they knew it was authentic for goodness’ sake,” he noted.
“It was an operation to, I believe, continue this effort that we saw from the Wray FBI, and before that the Comey FBI, and others in the intel community to hurt President Trump and, in this case, help presidential candidate and then, you know, future President Biden,” he added.
Jordan recently referred former CIA Director John Brennan for possible prosecution for lying to Congress in connection with the alleged Russia collusion and said he is confident that newly confirmed Attorney General Todd Blanche will get to the bottom of wrongdoing and punish responsible people.
“I have been very impressed with Todd Blanche, the best Attorney General I’ve ever worked with,” Jordan said. “I do believe he is committed to getting to the truth and holding people accountable.
“I do think it’s important to hold people accountable and to dig in all this, and I trust that Todd Blanche is going to,” he added.
A spreadsheet that was recovered from U.S. intelligence agency files and made public Wednesday by the White House Government Transparency Task Force shows that spy agencies and the FBI created a list of more than six dozen prominent organizations, Americans or foreigners who became figures in the Biden family Ukraine scandal and the 2019 impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump.
“Targets” and “Conduits”
The spreadsheet neatly divided figures along political lines, with Democrats like the Bidens, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Barack Obama and George Soros listed as victimized “targets” of Russian disinformation and conservatives like Fox News, One America News, filmmaker Michael Caputo and Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani as “conduits” for disinformation.
The FBI also labeled two of President Donald Trump’s first-term Cabinet secretaries, Pompeo and Barr, as well as Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley, Ron Johnson and Lindsey Graham and House GOP committee chairmen Devin Nunes and Jim Jordan as “conduits” even while they all investigated whether the allegations of corruption against the Biden family were true.
You can read the spreadsheet below:
Defensive Briefing Spreadsheet.pdf
The designations were part of a secret counterintelligence operation codenamed “Round River” that was launched during the 2020 election by a task force of FBI analysts claiming to be fighting “malign foreign influence” in the 2020 election, according to an administration official.
The Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), based in FBI headquarters, concurred with each of the assessments in the spreadsheet with a “no objection” designation, the documents state.
Many of the Americans were identified as potential candidates for defensive briefings, though the spreadsheets and documents found so far do not identify how many Americans ultimately were given such briefings.
In some ways, the Round River operation is a mirror opposite of the Russia collusion probe known as Crossfire Hurricane in which the FBI pursued unsubstantiated allegations spread by Democrats that Trump and his allies conspired with Vladimir Putin to hijack the 2016 election. In Round River, FBI analysts sought to dismiss significant evidence in the bureau’s possession, including Hunter Biden’s own laptop, pointing to possible corruption by the Bidens.
Documents released by the White House earlier this month exposed an investigation in 2017 codenamed “Oxferd Comma” alleging the newly elected president Trump may have been acting as a Russian asset when he fired then-Director James Comey even though the bureau’s own evidence overwhelmingly showed at the time there was no collusion with the Kremlin.
Remarkably, the effort to portray the Bidens’ scandals as Russian disinformation came even though confidential human sources working for the FBI and other agencies began reporting a steady stream of concerns starting in 2015 that Ukraine was possibly targeting the future first family for influence, the memos show. The FBI has identified at least 14 informants who were providing derogatory information on the Bidens, according to an FBI letter made public Wednesday.
In that letter to the White House Government Transparency Task Force, FBI Director Kash Patel said the Foreign Influence Task Force was terminated on his watch and its activities are now under investigation.
Operation Round River a political tool, not a national security issue
He said he shared concerns cited in a 2025 Director of National Intelligence memo declassified on Wednesday that Round River was used as a political tool to neutralize an alleged corruption narrative about Biden, the Democrats’ 2020 presidential nominee, rather than to address true national security threats.
“While our internal review of the FITF is not yet complete, we are investigating whether the FITF used information learned from the Round River assessment to undermine or influence ongoing investigations by only focusing on the subset of CHS’s (Confidential Human Sources) involving the Bidens,” Patel wrote, according to the letter reviewed by Just the News.
“We remain concerned that defensive briefings to Congress may have been overly focused on just Biden and Ukraine rather than the balanced picture of all foreign threats,” he added.
Patel said the bureau is “firmly committed to identifying, investigating and holding accountable all abuses” that occurred during the Round River operation and to ensure “that future counterintelligence operations remain focused exclusively on legitimate foreign threats and are never used to advance political narratives.”
Editor’s Note: John Solomon is on leave as Editor-in-Chief of Just the News while working as the chairman of the White House Government Transparency Task Force as an unpaid special government employee. His name appeared in the spreadsheet released Wednesday as a potential “conduit” of Russian disinformation
