The Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic and Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence released information about new bombshell testimony Tuesday alleging senior Central Intelligence Agency officials bribed CIA analysts to reject the COVID-19 lab leak theory, despite evidence showing the disease likely came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
"A multi-decade, senior-level, current Agency officer has come forward to provide information to the Committees regarding the Agency’s analysis into the origins of COVID-19. According to the whistleblower, the Agency assigned seven officers to a COVID Discovery Team (Team). The Team consisted of multi-disciplinary and experienced officers with significant scientific expertise. 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," a letter from Committee Chairmen Brad Wenstrup and Mike Turner to CIA Director Bill Burns states.
"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 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," the letter continues.
Wenstrup and Turner are investigating how the CIA "handled its internal investigation into the origins of COVID-19" and is requesting a number of documents from the agency, including "All documents and communications regarding the pay history, to include the awarding of any type of financial or performance-based incentive/financial bonus to members of all iterations of the COVID Discovery Team(s)."
Early on in the pandemic, former CIA director and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Republican Senator Tom Cotton and others pointed to a lab leak. Dr. Anthony Fauci, who worked to fund the Wuhan Institute engaged in illegal and dangerous gain-of-function research, worked with Facebook and other big tech platforms to remove and censor news stories about the lab leak.
Eventually the company did an about-face and reversed some of the their censorship.
Facebook will no longer take down posts claiming that Covid-19 was man-made or manufactured, a company spokesperson told POLITICO on Wednesday, a move that acknowledges the renewed debate about the virus’ origins.
Facebook’s policy tweak arrives as support surges in Washington for a fuller investigation into the origins of Covid-19 after the Wall Street Journal reported that three scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were hospitalized in late 2019 with symptoms consistent with the virus. The findings have reinvigorated the debate about the so-called Wuhan lab-leak theory, once dismissed as a fringe conspiracy theory.