by Greg Piper
CIA management overruled analysts' conclusions in favor of lab leak, retaliated when they protested "middle-of-the-night, anonymous rewrite" of their work, Gabbard's task force member says. CIA blasts Rand Paul for "bad faith" hearing.
Dr. Anthony Fauci didn't have to force himself into
intelligence community discussions about the origin of SARS-CoV-2, whose
emergence may have been facilitated by funding he provided a Chinese
lab, according to a CIA whistleblower.
The IC "happily pursued" the then-director of the National
Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, consulting with Fauci's
"conflicted list of curated subject-matter experts" to settle on a
natural-origin explanation for COVID-19, senior operations officer James Erdman told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Wednesday.
This was despite analysts within IC agencies, many of them
on "joint duty assignment" from the CIA, circulating papers early in
COVID that "all the conditions were present for a lab leak," said
Erdman, an Army Ranger and foreign service officer before joining the
CIA in 2013.
It was Erdman's second appearance before the committee but
the first in public, having testified before its members in a classified
setting. Chairman Rand Paul, R-Ky., said that transcript is still
undergoing classified review.
Last month, Erdman finished his joint duty assignment with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence Director's Initiatives Group, established by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard a year ago to restore trust and accountability to the IC.
CIA management overruled its own analysts' conclusions in
favor of a lab leak and retaliated when they protested the
"middle-of-the-night, anonymous rewrite" of their work, changing their
assessment to a "non-call judgment," Erdman testified.
The agency "refused to comply with lawful oversight" as the
DIG reviewed the IC's work on COVID origins and "illegally monitored"
its personnel and contact with whistleblowers, even firing a contractor a
day after the whistleblower met with DIG, he also said.
The CIA also seized 40 boxes of files undergoing ODNI declassification, related to the Kennedy assassination and CIA mind-control project MK-Ultra, when DIG ceased its work, according to Erdman. The CIA's Freedom of Information Act page on MK-Ultra disappeared between Aug. 9 and Aug. 21 last year, archives show, yet still appears in Google search results.
Florida GOP Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, who chairs the Task Force on Declassification of Federal Secrets, scheduled a hearing on MK-Ultra for May 13 but announced its postponement the day before, citing "legitimate" hesitance to testify by three of four witnesses. She warned the CIA on Wednesday afternoon she'd be following up on Erdman's disclosure.
The CIA blasted Paul's committee for "bad faith" in a statement to Fox News
as the hearing got underway, for "subpoenaing an Agency officer for
testimony today without notifying CIA" after already getting his
closed-door testimony.
"The witness testifying today is not appearing as a
whistleblower in pursuit of the truth" but under Paul's subpoena, public
affairs director Liz Lyons emphasized. "This proceeding amounts to
nothing more than dishonest political theater masquerading as a
congressional hearing," when the CIA assessed a year ago that COVID more likely leaked from a lab.
Erdman confirmed to the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on
Investigations Chair Ron Johnson, R-Wis., that the CIA hadn't cleared
his testimony and that he doesn't have a "game plan" for dealing with
possible retaliation.
While it's a good sign that the CIA gave him a desk since
his recent return from Gabbard's task force, Erdman said, he asked
Johnson to "hold off" before publicizing more detailed allegations he
gave Congress, as Johnson waved the sheet from the dais.
Paul and Johnson, with Erdman's support, called for a new congressional committee to review IC abuses as a sequel to the 1975-1976 Church Committee.
The CIA doesn't give Johnson "squat" in response to his
subpoenas, the senator said, also pleading with the mainstream media to
belatedly report his subcommittee's findings about the Biden
administration's intentional burying of COVID vaccine injuries as early as March 2021, as alleged by a Food and Drug Administration whistleblower.
Committee Democrats also showed no interest in the hearing, with their complete absence noted by a "shocked" Johnson and Sen. Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio.
Erdman said he wished Democrats had shown up, because the
parties must cooperate to "pull the purse strings when agencies are
behaving poorly," as when the Justice Department refuses to prosecute
bad actors. Moreno had just relayed that his constituents complained
about the absence of "perp walks" for officials who allegedly covered up
COVID origins.
'Cross-pollination' in the system makes gain-of-function research more dangerous
CIA science analysts "repeatedly concluded" a lab leak was
most likely but the IC "buried, softened or withheld" that conclusion
from Congress, Paul said in his opening statement summarizing Erdman's
planned testimony.
Instead, a "small circle" of scientists, federal research grantees and IC advisers, including ODNI's Biological Sciences Expert Group,
moved among agencies and briefings to coordinate the natural-origin
narrative while falsely portraying their findings as the result of
independent research, Paul said.
He noted BSEG advisers included University of North Carolina virologist Ralph Baric, who collaborated with Chinese virologist Shi Zhengli to conduct the gain-of-function research that may have unleashed COVID. Both also collaborated with Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance, which Fauci used to pass through funding to Zhengli's Wuhan Institute of Virology.
UNC notified faculty Tuesday that Baric was retiring in June, two weeks after former Senate pharmaceutical corruption investigator Paul Thacker reported
the feds had removed Baric from his National Institutes of Health
grants and that UNC had put Baric on leave while refusing to cooperate
with NIH officials to learn more about Baric's coronavirus research.
Fauci's role in the "coverup" was intentional, influencing
the analytical process and findings through "injection points" to push
his experts into the "orbit" of the IC, Erdman said.
The first, Feb. 3, 2020, was two days after Fauci's controversial phone call with virologists
who initially thought COVID looked too bespoke to have emerged
naturally but would soon write the natural-origin paper Proximal Origin.
Paul called them "part of the same machine designed to reach the same
conclusion," saying one received big grants after changing his mind.
The second, June 4, 2021, kicked off a 90-day study led by
the National Intelligence Council. One of the officers questioned why
they didn't have "a separate set" of experts since Fauci came from the
world of public health, Erdman said.
No one directly came out and noted Fauci's conflict of
interest for having approved funding for the Wuhan Institute of
Virology, a possible source for the virus, according to Erdman. "It was
more subtle than that" as reflected by emails his task force reviewed.
Fauci did "significantly influence" the change in analysis,
with documentation showing the CIA leaning toward a lab leak on Aug.
12, 2021 but changing its mind five days later, Erdman said. "We have no
idea why that changed" because the CIA won't provide documentation.
The IC's fear of the American public learning that their
taxpayer dollars may have played a role in COVID's emergence was "part
of the calculus" for the suppression of lab-leak, Erdman said, again
emphasizing the subtlety of the thinking.
"There's sort of a zeitgeist that runs underneath the
analysis," according to Erdman, saying a whistleblower justified not
going public because "nobody wanted the lab-leak conclusion" and too
many are "willing to make excuses for China." The motivation was not to
spite Trump but "reluctance" to provide information that could be
"geopolitically destabilizing."
The task force found a "much larger meta-problem sitting on
top of COVID," the "cross-pollination" within the ecosystem, Erdman
said.
The National Academy of Sciences, for example, helps devise
policy on weapons of mass destruction and is also full of Chinese
researchers. "If we're not careful, we're going to have Chinese
researchers helping us draft U.S. WMD policy," he said.
The federal government's inability to "differentiate
between public health and biodefense," and the "oversight-resistant
ecosystem of life-science actors," makes gain-of-function research
increasingly dangerous both at home and abroad, he said.
Changes after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks "muddled
boundaries" between scientists, the military and the IC, according to
Erdman. The system is "deliberately opaque and excessively redundant,"
with an infrastructure seemingly intended to worsen bureaucratic bloat.
"There was no oversight monitoring how this web of
relationships influenced research, policy and public health in any
holistic way" for more than 20 years, he said.
Greg Piper
Source: https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/fauci-infected-intelligence-community-covid-origin-probe-it-was
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