Spy scientists repeatedly concluded that a lab accident caused the COVID-19 pandemic but more senior bureaucrats watered down and suppressed their conclusions, a CIA senior operations officer testified to Congress on Wednesday.
The CIA officer and whistleblower, James E. Erdman III, described under oath in a hearing called by Sen. Rand Paul on Wednesday a pattern of obstruction that promoted the conclusions of a tight knit group of virologists close to Anthony Fauci while downplaying the conclusions of the intelligence community’s own biological experts. Erdman recently departed from a task force organized by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard to dig into whether the CIA violated its own analytic standards in its assessment of the cause of the deadliest pandemic in a century. Even from that perch — Gabbard’s office ostensibly oversees the CIA — Erdman faced continued bureaucratic stonewalling from the spy agency.
As Erdman and Gabbard dug into the apparent coverup, the CIA denied the task force documents, illegally surveilled its members and fired one of its witnesses the day after the committee interviewed that witness, the whistleblower testified.
“Coincidentally, whenever the CIA investigates itself it never finds any wrongdoing,” Erdman said. “The accountability piece has to happen or this is just going to keep happening.”
Fauci and the CIA didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
About seven CIA subject matter experts concluded the origin of the COVID pandemic to be a lab accident during a 90-day assessment of the evidence ordered by former President Joe Biden. But when the experts delivered their scientific analysis to the intelligence community’s National Counterproliferation and Biosecurity Center, it made little impact with the bureaucratic higher-ups.
Erdman said the analysis was countered with a new report and that its conclusion underwent a “middle of the night rewrite” to read: “We never precisely know the origins of SARS-CoV-2.”
He added that the use of the word “precisely” deviates from the standard practice at CIA, which is to make imprecise assessments and assign them a confidence level of low, moderate or high confidence. The change was made sometime in the five days between Aug. 12, 2023, and Aug. 17, 2023, but Gabbard’s team was not able to access the necessary documents to find out why. These CIA experts received exceptional performance reviews and bonuses sometime after that.
Paul also cited the Biological Sciences Experts Group (BSEG), an advisory panel to the intelligence community on biological weapons. University of North Carolina virologist Ralph Baric, a close collaborator of the Wuhan Institute of Virology on engineering coronaviruses like SARS-CoV-2, who met with Fauci in February 2020, serves on the BSEG.
The Daily Caller News Foundation first reported the role of the BSEG and NCBC in suppressing COVID intelligence last year.
Despite overseeing a civilian agency at the National Institutes of Health, Fauci injected himself into the intelligence community’s assessments through his influence over the BSEG and by advising the National Intelligence Council to consult his own handpicked scientists, Erdman said.
Emails published through the Freedom of Information Act have shown that Fauci worked closely with a clique of virologists who stressed the pandemic must have arisen naturally despite expressing private concerns about a lab leak.
Erdman testified there are 2,000 classified documents related to COVID’s origins that Gabbard is working to get released, but they must be run through the intelligence community’s many agencies to ensure they do not reveal sources and methods. Congress passed a law in 2023 mandating the declassification of intelligence related to the WIV, but Biden’s intelligence chief Avril Haines flouted that law.
Erdman testified in response to a subpoena from Paul’s Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs. The testimony dragged out into the open the behind-the-scenes tension between Gabbard’s office and Paul versus the CIA and its Trump-appointed director, John Ratcliffe.
Ratcliffe’s communications director Liz Lyons lambasted the hearing as “political theater.” Lyons stressed that Erdman had already given closed door testimony to the committee. Paul stressed that real congressional oversight happens in public view.
Paul’s committee issued subpoenas to 14 agencies related to the COVID origins issue in January 2025. Erdman said that Gabbard has sought to be responsible, but that ODNI has not received all of the responsive documents from CIA or from the State Department’s intelligence arm, which leaned on scientists close to Fauci in its assessment.
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