Covfefe (@hippie)

Round River an FBI operation running in parallel with Bill Barr's effort to investigate/vet allegations concerning Biden-family corruption and Ukraine. The critical problem was information segregation: In January 2020, AG Bill Barr directed U.S. Attorney Scott Brady in Pittsburgh to vet information concerning Ukrainian corruption and the Biden family, including information supplied by Rudy Giuliani and others. At essentially the same time, the FBI's Pittsburgh office was running Round River. Brady says he didn't know Round River existed.  Round River files were designated "Prohibited Access," meaning ordinary FBI database searches could not retrieve them. Consequently, Brady's team could be searching FBI systems for terms such as Biden and Burisma while not seeing potentially relevant material that the FBI had deliberately placed behind the access barrier.  And that's the part I think is most significant. The alleged mechanism According to the reporting and later-released material, the FBI's Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF) created a process for gathering derogatory information concerning the Bidens from confidential human sources and then evaluating/labeling that information as potential Russian disinformation.  Sen. Chuck Grassley's earlier disclosures are important here. He said FBI Supervisory Intelligence Analyst Brian Auten opened an assessment in August 2020 that was used by an FBI Headquarters team to discredit negative Hunter Biden information as foreign disinformation and stop investigative activity. Grassley subsequently said FITF sought CHS reporting held around the country concerning the Biden family and treated it as potential Russian disinformation.  The scale is potentially enormous: Cleveland notes Grassley's disclosure that the FBI had more than 40 confidential human sources providing criminal information concerning Joe, James and Hunter Biden.  And here's the really interesting part for your "players/nodes" thinking Look at the structure: Barr → directs Scott Brady → Brady begins vetting Biden/Ukraine information → FBI database searches are performed  Meanwhile FBI HQ / FITF → Round River → gathers Biden-related derogatory intelligence → labels/discredits some of it as Russian disinformation → places relevant material behind Prohibited Access → Brady's investigation doesn't know that material exists  That's not simply "the FBI didn't investigate Biden." It's potentially two investigative tracks operating inside the same institution, with one track unable to see the other. And that makes the Brady/Barr piece much more interesting than the headline.  There's another layer The Federalist reports sources saying Round River may have extended beyond suppressing Biden-related investigative leads to examining people who publicly raised those allegations—reporters, lawyers, lawmakers and others—and potentially treating some as Russian-influence/security concerns.  That portion needs to be treated more cautiously because the article characterizes it as information from sources rather than something established by the documents themselves. But if substantiated, the issue changes from: "Did the FBI suppress an investigation?" to: "Did elements of the federal government use counterintelligence authorities to identify, discredit and potentially investigate Americans who were disseminating information inconvenient to the Biden campaign?" That's a much bigger constitutional question.  And now we have an important update The White House's current declassification page explicitly lists Round River and says the newly released documents reveal a secret FBI/intelligence operation intended to neutralize Biden-family corruption allegations during the 2020 election. It describes Round River as essentially the reverse mirror of Crossfire Hurricane.  So I would not treat the March Federalist article as the final word anymore. I'd treat it as the early map of the terrain.  And given what I've been looking at with Barr, Pompeo, Comey, Rosenstein, Mueller, etc., there is one particular question I'd put a bright circle around: Who knew about Round River, when did they know, and who authorized the separation between Round River and Barr/Brady's investigation?  That is the potential command-and-information-flow question. And the newly declassified documents may let us move from "interesting theory" to names, dates, memos, authorities and chains of communication.  The Federalist — “Round River” FBI Op White House — Election Integrity / Round River documents