CIA Whistleblower Alleges Coverup Of Lab Leak Intelligence
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…
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.”