CIA Whistleblower Testifies Fauci’s ‘Cover-Up’ of Covid Lab-Leak Origin Was ‘Intentional’
CIA Whistleblower Testifies Fauci’s ‘Cover-Up’ of Covid Lab-Leak Origin Was ‘Intentional’
A CIA whistleblower says Dr. Anthony Fauci’s role in the “cover-up” of Covid-19’s origins was “intentional.”
James Erdman, a career CIA operations officer who spent much of the last year on joint assignment for the Director of National Intelligence Director Initiatives Group (DNI DIG), testified before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs on Wednesday, telling committee members Fauci “influenced the analytical process and findings by leveraging his position to ensure the [intelligence community] consulted with a conflicted list of curated subject matter experts, public health officials, and scientists.”
He further said the CIA and DNI analytic managers responsible for examining the origin of Covid “made decisions inconsistent with the conclusions of subject matter experts and analytical tradecraft, consistently favoring the theory of zoonosis or natural origin.”
And when the CIA conducted a Covid relook in 2022 and 2023, the CIA “retaliated against analysts supporting the lab-leak hypothesis,” Erdman says, particularly against those who refused to agree with “management’s middle of the night anonymous rewrite of the analysis, which changed the assessment to a non-call judgment.”
The CIA then failed to comply with the DNI DIG’s oversight investigation, refusing to provide necessary information for investigators to understand why analytical standards at the CIA were violated. The CIA also illegally spied on the computer and phones belonging to DIG personnel, along with their investigations and contact with whistleblowers, Erdman alleges.
“These were Americans being spied upon illegally while executing duties directed by the president and under the authority of the director of national intelligence,” he said.
The alleged retaliation led to the firing of one CIA contractor who assisted with the DIG’s investigation; the contractor was fired by the CIA one day after meeting with the DIG.
In 2021, as the intelligence community worked to make an assessment as to whether Covid-19 began with a lab-leak or via natural origins, Fauci offered investigators a list of subject matter experts to contact. Erdman and others would later discover that the list included experts who had been in Fauci’s orbit for more than 20 years and who had authored a scientific paper that Fauci infamously commissioned to debunk the hypothesis that Covid escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan, China.
Some of the scientists whom Fauci directed the intelligence committee to contact were part of the Biological Sciences Experts Group (BSEG), an Office of Director of National Intelligence advisory body, whose members “often receive considerable funding from NIAID and public health agencies,” according to Erdman, who called attention to the “overly complex” infrastructure in the public health community that led to conflicts of interest and prevented proper oversight.
“The BSEG scientists influenced national laboratory [weapons of mass destruction] research policy decisions, finished analysis and other intelligence matters, creating misaligned incentives and conflicts of interest, as well as counter intelligence issues.”
The BSEG has consulted on bio-defense issues for the intelligence community since 2006, while also conducting government-funded research, holding academic positions, maintaining roles in public health institutions, and serving as members in the National Academy of Science.
Some of the scientists even worked with Chinese scientists on coronavirus and other pathogen studies, pursuing vaccines.
“There was no oversight monitoring how this web of relationships influenced research policy and public health in any holistic way, for over 20 years,” Erdman said.
In fact, several BSEG scientists helped Fauci rewrite definitions of gain-of-function in 2015, to lift a funding pause on dangerous research. Gain-of-function research is defined as the modification of viruses for the purpose of making them more infectious or deadly for study in a laboratory.
Other Fauci-endorsed experts participated in Planning Event 201 in 2019, which Erdman described as a “coronavirus pandemic tabletop exercise curiously similar to the events that played out during the Covid-19 pandemic.” That event was attended by Fauci and individuals with intelligence community ties like former DNI Avril Haines.
“Dr. Anthony Fauci’s influence over the [intelligence community]’s Covid origin analysis and the witting and unwitting role some BSEG scientists and IC personnel played in the cover-up exposed why this issue is of deep concern,” he added.
Erdman said the interconnected web of conflicts of interest is a “national security crisis caused by the inability to provide real oversight” and called for proper oversight with “teeth” going forward, even suggesting the possibility of an investigation in the style of a ’70s era Church Committee, a U.S. Senate select committee that investigated illegal intelligence abuses by the CIA, FBI, NSA, and IRS.
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