Last Wednesday, House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan sent FBI Director Kash Patel a letter demanding every document connected to an operation codenamed Round River. If you haven’t heard of it, that’s understandable; it’s the sequel nobody promoted, and I’ll get to it. I’ve spent part of my career testifying as an expert witness on fiduciary duty, the branch of law that punishes people for betraying the trust placed in them. Measured by that standard, Round River isn’t merely disinformation; it’s a breach of duty so complete that in my industry it would end a career and trigger a bar complaint. In Washington, it’s earned a strongly worded letter. That’s the whole scandal in one sentence: the deep state keeps getting caught, and nobody ever pays for it.
Start with what most people half remember. In October 2020, less than three weeks before the election, the New York Post published emails from a laptop Hunter Biden abandoned at a Delaware repair shop. Within 48 hours, 51 former intelligence officials, including two former CIA directors, signed an open letter declaring the story had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” Twitter locked the Post out of its own account. Facebook throttled the link. The letter did exactly what it was built to do. By 2022, the Washington Post’s own hired cryptography experts had authenticated thousands of the laptop’s emails using the same digital signatures banks use to verify a wire transfer. Real disinformation, corrected two years too late to matter.
Here’s the detail that should bother you more than the letter itself: the man who organized it told Congress, under oath, exactly why he did it. Michael Morell, former acting CIA director, testified that a call from Antony Blinken, then a senior Biden campaign adviser, “triggered” his decision to draft the statement. Asked why he wanted to help the vice president win, Morell didn’t dress it up: “Because I wanted him to win the election,” he said. He had no evidence of Russian involvement, he testified. Four of the 51 signers, including Morell, were active CIA contractors at the time, with badges granting access most Americans never get. They used their old authority to help a friend’s campaign and called it a national security judgment. My brother spent his career in Army Special Forces guarding secrets that get people killed and signed papers promising decades of silence. These 51 men signed a letter to swing a presidential election and called it patriotism.
The paper trail keeps growing. In February, former senior intelligence officer Thomas Kuhns, who spent his career on the intelligence community’s analytic standards committee under Obama, filed a formal complaint with the intelligence community’s inspector general. His conclusion, built on line-by-line tradecraft analysis rather than partisan grievance, was that the letter’s “planning, drafting, and dissemination” showed characteristics consistent with coordinated intelligence deception operations. Kuhns noted that none of the 51 signers, despite decades of FBI contacts, ever asked whether the laptop was real before declaring it Russian bait. In May, the inspector general referred his complaint to the Justice Department, and nobody there has said a word about it publicly since. A career analyst accusing his own former colleagues of running a deception operation against the electorate should be front-page news. It barely registered.
The FBI, we now know, was running a parallel operation of its own. Documents declassified this August show analysts on the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force launched it around December 2019, sorting more than 70 Americans and organizations by political utility. Democrats, including Joe and Hunter Biden, were filed as “targets” of Russian disinformation; Republicans, including Bill Barr and Mike Pompeo, were filed as “conduits” spreading it. Of 53 confidential sources touching the case, at least 14 fed the bureau derogatory information on the Bidens dating to 2015. The FBI never investigated a single tip; it labeled them as disinformation anyway, then warned Congress that asking about Burisma made members unwitting tools of Moscow. Patel says he’s disbanded the unit and opened a review, and that the bureau has identified “tens of thousands of responsive pages” and is “preparing… for disclosure.” Six years later, we’re still waiting on someone to flip the switch.
None of this worked without help. Newsrooms that spent 2020 calling the laptop Russian disinformation spent the next three years waving off Joe Biden’s visible decline the same way, right up until special counsel Robert Hur described the sitting president as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” too frail to stand trial for mishandling documents. Then came the June 2024 debate, and the collective editorial memory of the press corps improved overnight. Convenient. The pattern repeats because it works: dismiss the inconvenient fact, discredit whoever raises it, and admit the truth once it’s too late to change the outcome.
Defenders of the letter’s signers claim these were private citizens exercising their First Amendment rights, not the CIA acting as an institution. But Morell asked the agency’s own Publication Review Board to clear his draft the same week he recruited signatories, which means he leaned on his active clearance and his institutional relationship to lend the letter a credibility no private citizen carries on their own. You don’t get to borrow the flag when it helps and hand it back once the subpoenas start.
None of this happens in a vacuum. The public reads Round River against a backdrop it already distrusts. A federal special counsel indicted Trump on 37 felony counts for retaining classified documents at Mar-a-Lago; a different special counsel investigated Biden’s parallel documents problem and charged him with nothing because prosecutors doubted a jury would convict a man they called too forgetful to be culpable. Hunter Biden was convicted on gun and tax charges, then pardoned by his father before sentencing. The Durham report found the FBI opened a full investigation into the Trump campaign on raw, uncorroborated intelligence and never opened so much as an inquiry into similar intelligence about a Clinton campaign scheme to do the same in reverse. None of that proves coordination. It’s enough to explain why voters call the asymmetry two-tiered before Round River even enters the conversation.
Here’s the accountability scoreboard six years in: 51 security clearances revoked by executive order, a couple of internal reviews, one inspector general referral sitting at Justice since May, and not one indictment, deposition, or dollar of restitution from anyone who ran either operation. Compare that to a broker who mismarks risk tolerance: license gone, career over. The deep state gets a strongly worded congressional letter and a press release about an “ongoing review.” Small wonder trust in the federal government sits near a five-decade low, with barely one in five Americans saying Washington does the right thing most of the time. That’s not apathy. It’s a verdict. Congress can fix this without rewriting the Constitution: criminal exposure for clearance holders who abuse them and inspectors general free to act on their own timeline. Until one of those 51 names sees the inside of a courtroom, the lesson every future intelligence officer will draw is the only one that matters: lie for the right team, and the worst that happens is you lose a parking pass at Langley.
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