✪ The Deep State Keeps Playing Its Get-Out-of-Jail-Free Card

ppp

ast week, 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 Operation Round River, that’s understandable; because it’s the sequel nobody promoted. More later about that. I’ve spent a large part of my career as an attorney testifying as an expert witness on fiduciary duty; the branch of law which punishes people for betraying the trust placed in them. Measured by that standard, Round River isn’t merely more disinformation; it’s a breach of duty so complete in my industry it could easily end a career and trigger a bar complaint. However, in Washington, it barely earns more than a strongly worded letter. That summarizes the entire Round River scandal in one sentence: the Deep State keeps getting caught, and nobody ever seems to pay for it.

Start with what most people now only half remember. In October 2020, less than three weeks before the 2020 election, the New York Post published emails from a laptop Hunter Biden abandoned at a Delaware computer 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 also throttled the link.

That letter did exactly what it was intended 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 wire transfers. Real disinformation, exposed and corrected two years too late to matter. Here’s the detail which should disturb you more than the letter itself: the man who organized the letter told Congress, under oath, exactly why he did it.

Michael Morell, former acting CIA director, testified 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 testified he had no evidence of Russian involvement. Four of the 51 signers, including Morell, were active CIA contractors at the time, with badges granting security clearance and access most Americans never get. They used their good old boy 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 which get people killed; he was sworn to secrecy by signing papers which promised decades of silence. However, these 51 men were allowed to swing a presidential election by signing a fraudulent letter and calling it patriotism.

The paper trail of this criminal corruption 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 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 everywhere. Yet it barely registered before disappearing altogether.

We now know the FBI 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 designated as “targets” of Russian disinformation. Republicans, including Bill Barr and Mike Pompeo, were designated as the “conduits” spreading it. Of 53 confidential sources involved directly with the case, at least 14 fed the bureau derogatory information on the Bidens dating all the way back to 2015.

The FBI never investigated a single tip; but it still labeled them as disinformation anyway; then warned Congress asking any questions about Burisma would make those members into unwitting tools of Moscow. Patel said he’s disbanded the unit and opened a new review in which 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 was possible without help. Newsrooms which spent 2020 calling the laptop “Russian disinformation” spent the next three years waving off Joe Biden’s visible mental decline the same way; right up until the moment 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. How convenient. The pattern is repeated because it works: dismiss the inconvenient fact, discredit whoever raises it, and admit the truth once the damage has already been done and it’s already too late to change the outcome.

Defenders of the letter’s signers claim these were only private citizens exercising their First Amendment rights and 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 had to lean on his active clearance and his institutional relationship to give the letter a degree of credibility no private citizen can impart on their own. You don’t get to borrow the flag when it helps your cause and then 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 consider the asymmetry biased and two-tiered before Round River even enters the conversation.

Here’s the accountability scoreboard after 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: their license gone & career over. Instead of accountability, the Deep State gets a strongly worded congressional letter and a press release about an “ongoing review.”

Small wonder trust in the Federal Government is now sitting near a five-decade low, with barely one in five Americans who say 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 or a jail cell, the lesson every future intelligence officer will draw is the only one that matters: lie for the right team, and the worst that can happen is you’ll lose a parking pass at Langley. ✪