The swamp runs deeper than anyone ever imagined. The consequences are truly shocking.
And a CIA whistleblower just delivered scary news to Republican lawmakers.
Back in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic, conservatives easily put two and two together to say that the virus leaked from a laboratory.
What ensued was a governmental and media campaign to paint anyone who suggested the lab leak theory was credible as an idiotic conspiracy theorist.
Everyone’s favorite homegrown tyrant, Dr. Anthony Fauci, spearheaded the suppression as his emails detailed.
"Fauci shut down lab leak theory despite scientists lending it credence, emails show" https://t.co/W9Ov5EaY42
— House Republicans (@HouseGOP) February 26, 2023
Now, according to new congressional evidence, the Central Intelligence Agency bribed six officials researching the origins of COVID-19 with hush money in order to conceal their judgment that the virus likely originated in a Chinese facility.
The Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic and the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence of the United States House of Representatives said on Tuesday that an anonymous “highly credible senior-level CIA” official claimed that six members with “significant scientific expertise” in the federal agency tasked with investigating the origins of SARS-CoV-2 discovered that the virus likely originated in a Wuhan laboratory.
“According to the whistleblower, at the end of its review, six of the seven members of the Team believed the intelligence and science were sufficient to make a low confidence assessment that COVID-19 originated from a laboratory in Wuhan, China,” House panel chairmen reps. Brad Wenstrup (R-OH) and Mike Turner (R-OH) wrote.
However, when the officers finished their inquiry, a CIA whistleblower claims the agency gave financial incentives to six of the seven experts participating in the probe to revise their story about the virus, according to a letter submitted Tuesday to CIA Director William Burns.
“The seventh member of the Team, who also happened to be the most senior, was the lone officer to believe COVID-19 originated through zoonosis,” the letter continued.
“The whistleblower further contends that to come to the eventual public determination of uncertainty, the other six members were given a significant monetary incentive to change their position.”
Separately, the committee requested that former CIA Chief Operating Officer Andrew Markridis engage in a “voluntary transcribed interview” on September 26, 2023. Markridis “played a central role” in the formulation and conclusion of the COVID probe, according to the whistleblower.
Markridis left the agency in 2022, having completed his agency’s response to COVID.
On the same day, lawmakers mandated that the CIA turn over all records pertaining to the formation of the COVID Discovery Teams, pay history, including the awarding of any financial or performance-based incentive/financial bonuses, and all communications from those teams with all members of federal government agencies, including the FBI, State Department, Health and Human Services, and Energy Department.
Earlier this year, the Department of Energy and the FBI were among the first federal authorities to conclude with moderate certainty that the pandemic’s roots were most likely a probable lab mishap in Wuhan.
In June, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declassified a long-awaited report on possible linkages between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and COVID’s origins. According to the paper, three lab workers who became ill in 2019 could not be immediately linked to the pandemic’s source since their symptoms were “consistent with but not diagnostic of COVID-19.”
“The I.C. has no information, however, indicating that any [Wuhan Institute of Virology] genetic engineering work has involved SARS-CoV-2, a close progenitor, or a backbone virus that is closely related enough to have been the source of the pandemic,” according to the study.
However, former National Intelligence Director John Ratcliffe testified before Congress in April that “a lab leak is the only explanation credibly supported by our intelligence, science, and common sense.”
“If our intelligence and evidence supporting a lab leak was placed side by side with our intelligence and evidence pointing to a natural origins or spillover theory, the lab leak side of the ledger would be long, convincing, even overwhelming — while the spillover side would be nearly empty and tenuous,” added Ratcliffe.
Stay tuned to the DC Daily Journal.
