☕️ DOWN THE RIVER ☙ Friday, August 14, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Operation Round River ran from Dec 2019 through the 2020 election, stamping "Russian disinformation" on its own informants' Biden crime tips. Not 1, or 2, or 3-- but 53 sources, all 'conduits.'

Good morning, C&C, it’s Friday! It’s hard to pick which was worst of the many top-secret “intelligence operations” our increasingly discredited agencies were running. They are also multiplying like rabbits that broke into the Cialis warehouse. This week, Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel declassified another one. Frankly, this one scraped the basement floor in Hades. Since the story is so important, and the reporting on it has been so dense and hard to follow, I am taking the time this morning to defog it and translate it in C&C’s entertaining yet clear style. Enjoy.

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

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Comedian Steven Wright once drily observed, “My neighbor has a circular driveway… he can’t get out.” He didn’t realize he was talking about the Federal Bureau of Investigation. We’ve already been disgusted by operations like Crossfire Hurricane, Arctic Frost, Plasmic Echo, and most recently, the moronically misspelled Oxferd C0mma. Since corporate media completely ignored this week’s story, we turn to the Washington Examiner’s Wednesday story, “FBI ran secret operation to extinguish Biden family foreign influence scandal: Declassified documents.” Welcome to Operation Round River.

Let’s start with the operation’s name. Round River. Whirlpools and natural sinks are sometimes called round rivers— because they suck you in and go nowhere. The operation’s name wasn’t any accident.

Back in the 1940s, author Aldo Leopold borrowed an apocryphal Paul Bunyan tall tale in an essay that began: “One of the marvels of early Wisconsin was the Round River, a river that flowed into itself, and thus sped around and around in a never-ending circuit.”

In the original Bunyan fable, the oversized lumberjack once hopped a log raft to the local sawmill. Three days later, the river brings him by a log camp that seemed strangely familiar. Three more days pass, and he sees another log camp, and this one looks just like his own camp, where he’d started. Not till the third pass does Paul —strong as an ox, but not particularly bright— recognize his own long johns flying above the camp as a flag and realize he’s been trapped on the Round River.

Get it? Crossfire Hurricane and all its little helpers were the workshops where the FBI created preposterous “Russia collusion allegations” against President Trump and lots of other Republicans. Round River was the drain, the whirlpool where the FBI sank real, worrisome foreign collusion evidence against the Biden Crime Family and Democrats.

The operation to drown inconvenient evidence started in 2019, right after Rudy Giuliani began probing Ukrainian oil giant Burisma, which happened to be paying Hunter Biden $1 million a year to do work Hunter was clearly incapable of doing. Get this: the operation only finally ended in 2025, after Trump took the oath, when FBI Director Kash Patel hauled the log raft out of the water.

The Round River trip took five+ years to go nowhere on purpose.

By the time it was shut down, the Round River team had determined that pretty much every major Republican around, far beyond President Trump, was a Russian asset, or “conduit for Russian disinformation.” It was the Red Scare Redux.

And Tulsi’s ODNI helpfully summarized the FBI’s work into a “friends and enemies” spreadsheet for ready reference.

🕵️‍♂️ The White House has conveniently posted a helpful link on its website where you can download the first two lightly redacted, declassified Round River documents. The first is the above-named “friends and enemies” spreadsheet. The second is a briefing slide deck prepared by former DNI Tulsi Gabbard’s Office of National Intelligence. Let’s start there.

Here is how the ODNI described Round River in a classified presentation deck with its own operational title, DELTA Project:

Allow me to translate the bureaucratese. Starting in December, 2019, an “unofficial” —translation: untraceable— FBI team grew inside the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, Russia division. This is where we get the first obscure acronym: FITF-R. Let’s give the unnamed group a name: the FBI’s “Russia Desk.”

It’s the most overused spy movie cliché of them all, where the cabal of corrupt spooks assigns a problematic case to the office burnouts to make sure the investigation never goes anywhere. The Russia Desk hoovered up “any/all derogatory information” about the Bidens and Ukraine so it could not investigate them.

Later, it expanded to help shield the Clinton Foundation, George Soros, Barack Obama, John Kerry, Victoria Nuland, and others.

The Russia Desk buried the incriminating Biden files in the Bureau’s unsearchable “Prohibited Access” system, a cryptic, firewalled software archive that was never supposed to exist, and, until Kash Patel exposed it, it was unknown to most of the FBI and even to the top members of Congress’ oversight committees.

Internally, the Russia Desk kept a list of names. Friends and enemies. Tulsi’s ODNI compiled the list on a spreadsheet. Here’s the first 2/3 page:

As you can see in the fourth column, the Russia Desk sorted people into two piles: “conduits” —i.e. Russian colluders to be discredited— or “targets”— people to be protected. The first conduit, unsurprisingly, was Rudy Giuliani. The first target (of protection) was the “Big Guy”— Joe Biden, the “target” of Rudy’s Burisma probe.

The Russia Desk’s list of Problematic Colluding Conduits quickly expanded to include more Republicans like Attorney General Bill Barr, Deputy Attorney General Rick Donohue, Trump’s Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, and Mike Pompeo. Also Senators like Lindsey Graham (RIP), Ron Johnson, Chuck Grassley, and Congressmen like Jim Jordan, Pete Sessions, and Devin Nunes. On the next page, the list adds entire media groups like OANN, Fox News, MAGA TV, reporters like John Solomon, and GOP alum like Michael Caputo. The red highlights indicated people the FBI was actively investigating.

In other words, in an ironic spasm that probably made Joe McCarthy’s rotting corpse spin like a top in his grave, the Russia Desk found Russian agents hidden under every bed in DC’s townhouses. All Republicans. They might as well have labeled the entire Republican Party as a Russian asset.

Why would the FBI’s Russia Desk take the unprecedented step of nominating the DOJ’s own sitting Attorney General, Bill Barr, for “Russia conduit” status? Oh, I don’t know. Maybe something like this. Fox News, February 2020:

“But as I did say to Senator Lindsey Graham, we have to be very careful,” Barr said at the time. “There are a lot of agendas in Ukraine.”

He did need to be careful. If you touched Ukraine, you got on the list.

🕵️‍♂️ Similarly, the FBI’s list of Protected Targets swelled to include George Soros, John Kerry, Vickie Nuland, Hillary, Obama, BlackRock officials, Ukrainian politicians and businessmen, the Democrats’ star witnesses from Trump’s impeachment trial, and more. It even named Hunter twice. All Democrats. All protected.

Just saying, but the favored “targets” list also included a name you probably never heard of: Cofer Black, the former head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center and then-Burisma board member. Ahem. Incest alert.

According to the ODNI’s report, one of the Russia Desk’s main jobs was to jump in with “defensive briefings” whenever Congress started pulling on a Ukraine Corruption thread. The Russia Desk “provided defensive briefings to any Congressional member who obtained reporting related to any aspect of the Ukraine narrative.”

A defensive briefing is the spies’ version of a proactive wellness check. Officially, a US official may be a target of foreign intelligence, or an unwitting channel for it, so the Bureau’s spooks sit them down and soberly warn them. For your own good, don’t take the meeting. Don’t trust the document. You’re being played. This is just Russian disinformation. Nothing to see here. Move along.

The legitimate version is something like, “hey, a Chinese officer is trying to seduce your staffer.” The sinister version, which is this one: they relabel the thing you’re investigating as the foreign operation, then warn you. After that, if you keep going, you’re not a senator with a case. You’re someone who was put on notice and ignored the intelligence community. They can leak the briefing. They already have the stamp.

Yesterday, Jim Jordan told reporter Michael Shellenberger that, regarding these ‘defensive’ briefings: “It was a farce. I remember talking to my staff about it as we walked to the elevators. We knew exactly what they were doing. They told us not to do what we were doing, which was looking into Hunter Biden.”

Back in 2021, Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI), explained the game in real time: “Because there was no substance to the briefing, I suspected that the briefing was being given to be used at some future date for the purpose that it is now being used: to offer the biased media an opportunity to falsely accuse me of being a tool of Russia.”

This is the way —starting the year before the 2020 election— the Russia Desk squashed the investigations into the Biden Crime Family’s Ukrainian businesses.

“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,” Kash Patel said in a masterpiece of understatement. Translation: they used a counterintelligence product as a single-subject gag order to make sure Biden got elected.

In public, we watched “51 former intelligence officials” openly discredit the Hunter Biden laptop as having “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” The “defensive briefings” to Congressmen were probably very similar, except pointier.

Defensive briefings! Don’t make me laugh. They weren’t defending the country from Ukraine or Russia. They were defending the narrative from troublesome Republicans by telling them not to believe their own eyes and ears. Your neighbor has a circular driveway. Defensive briefings were how the FBI made sure your neighbor couldn’t get out. Round River.

🕵️‍♂️ Now let’s discuss the confidential sources the FBI sent sailing.

The FBI did not throw any random bystanders into its circular stream. They chucked in their own informants. Kash Patel said Round River flagged at least 53 confidential human sources as possibly under hostile control. Meaning, people who might say things that could be extremely inconvenient to the 2020 election narrative.

At least 14 of those 53 had already reported criminal information on Joe Biden, Hunter, and Joe’s brother, James. The Russia Desk stamped them all as “under hostile control.” ODNI provided three examples of reports of Biden corruption drowned by the Russia Desk.

One file opened in May 2012 and was still being closed out in 2023. One opened in July 2017. One opened in March 2008, under Bush, was killed, reopened in September 2019 as impeachment caught fire, talked about a “Burisma dossier,” and was not terminated until April 2025.

“The team of Round River analysts had administrative access to all reporting,” ODNI reported, “and drafted intelligence products that were later added to each CHS file to show the reporting was deemed Russian disinformation.”

These were long-term Bureau informants, many older than the FITF itself. Round River’s job was to find their Biden-Ukraine reporting and staple a product into each file saying the reporting was Russian disinformation. They did not have to prove the sources were bad. They had admin access, which meant they could get to any report from any FBI field office. They typed and the reports went sailing to nowhere on the FBI’s Lazy River.

🕵️‍♂️ So what we see is yet another super-secret, election-oriented, weaponized water feature with an official operational name. This is exactly what Trump means when he keeps talking about “weaponization.” It was all aimed at Republicans. It was all meant to protect the Democrats’ candidate for president from being exposed as a corrupt tool of the corrupt Ukrainian regime.

And it just kept getting bigger. It got so big that it would inevitably come out, despite all the “Prohibited Access” secrecy, unless they kept control of the US government for a generation. Which was the whole point.

Let’s not get over our skis. However obvious it is, however much evidence this provides, we have not yet reached the point of conclusive legal proof. The officials involved will claim they were just doing their job, innocently notifying Congress of malign foreign influence wherever they suspected it might crop up next.

But, as ODNI stressed in bold-faced type in its briefing, the Russia Desk “did not corroborate any of the allegations.” In other words, they got “tips” about Russian influence, diligently warned everyone, but never actually investigated. They weren’t interested in confirming the tips. They marked Joe Biden as “briefed” and the late Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who chaired the FBI oversight committee, and Senator Chuck Grassley, who chaired the Finance committee (tasked with following Ukraine’s money), as “conduits.”

And Biden was the only name on the list marked “briefed.”

🕵️‍♂️ So where do we go from here? Reporter John Solomon —who is now working with the White House on the declassification task force— says we should expect “thousands more pages in the weeks ahead.” In a letter addressed to the White House Government Transparency Task Force, Director Patel offered to turn over what all 53 confidential human informants actually said.

Now that you have the background, here’s John Solomon , explaining the scheme to Newsmax:

CLIP: John Solomon explains Round River— “It was the ultimate protection racket for Joe Biden, done at taxpayers’ expense.” (2:43).

Consider this boomerang. Putting John Solomon —one of Round River’s conduits— on the Task Force was like putting Jay Bhattacharya in charge of the NIH. Hubris, meet Nemesis.

The light of transparency is streaming through. “At my direction, this FBI will take the unprecedented step of providing you with the source reporting from all 53 sources so you can finally see the facts,” Patel told the Task Force.

We are likely to see at least some of the Biden Crime Family allegations the FBI stranded. We will probably get Round River’s “disinformation memos” stapled to those reports. The memos documenting why it concluded a sitting Attorney General (Bill Barr) —the FBI’s head boss— and lots of Republicans in Congress were Russian “conduits.”

That full dump is out for delivery. So far, we just have a seating chart, or the list of castaways. The informants weren’t on the list— they were the logs.

🕵️‍♂️ Any of you still think the timing —mere months before the midterms— is coincidental? These declassified Round River documents are collapsing another colossal narrative. Think this is just politics as usual, an August Surprise? America has never before had such an up-close and personal view of our intelligence agencies, not even during the famous Church Committee hearings that exposed the CIA’s division of dirty tricks.

Now add Round River —which is just getting started— to the collapsing narratives around Fauci, the Southern Poverty Law Center, covid origins, Russiagate, and the rest. The month of collapses just got a river.

What a time to be alive. This is better than binge-watching the newest Netflix series. Six years on the water, and nobody on the raft ever looked up at the flag.

Have a fantastic Friday! Never fear, an all-new C&C roundup is right around the corner. Come back tomorrow for the next installment of essential news and caffeinated commentary.

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