Docs Suggest FBI Misclassified Info To Hide Biden Family Crimes

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:

This document is thus Top Secret and concerns a Special Access Program named “Butter Popcorn,” which would be abbreviated SAR-BP.

But according to Grassley’s letter, it does not appear that Round River was classified as a Special Access Program because the banner lacks any such designation. Nonetheless, the banner included the investigation name of Round River. To the Iowa senator, that suggests the agents may have nonetheless treated the investigation as a Special Access Program.

That matters because Special Access Programs don’t just limit who has access to the information within the FBI, but by statute only a few select senators and representatives receive briefings on those programs. So, if the FBI treated Round River as a Special Access Program, the many requests Grassley has made for relevant documents to conduct oversight could have been ignored. High-level approval is also needed to run a Special Access Program, which does not appear to have been given, although on this point, the Chair of the Judiciary Committee asks for “clarification” in his letter.

This latest development follows the earlier discovery by the Iowa senator that the FBI, under Director Wray, hid documents related to Crossfire Hurricane by use of the “Prohibited Access” functionality of the Sentinel case management system. That designation rendered the documents invisible to agents searching the FBI database.

It now appears the FBI had multiple ways of disappearing evidence — both evidence that inculpated the Bidens and exculpated Trump.

Margot Cleveland is an investigative journalist and legal analyst and serves as The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. Margot’s work has been published at The Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, the New Criterion, National Review Online, Townhall.com, the Daily Signal, USA Today, and the Detroit Free Press. She is also a regular guest on nationally syndicated radio programs and on Fox News, Fox Business, and Newsmax. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. Cleveland is also of counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland where you can read more about her greatest accomplishments—her dear husband and dear son. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.