Biden spy chiefs sidelined FBI, researchers who suspected COVID-19 lab leak: Report

According to a new report in the Wall Street Journal, spy chiefs prevented the FBI and Pentagon scientists from providing a counterpoint to their preferred COVID-19 origin theory at an important intelligence briefing in 2021.

There was a concerted effort by elements of the Biden administration and the scientific establishment during the pandemic to downplay the possibility that the COVID-19 virus originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where dangerous gain-of-function experiments were conducted on coronaviruses, sometimes with American funding.

While characterizing what was all along the most likely explanation as a conspiracy theory and in some cases censoring discussion of it online, the powers that be also did their best to suggest that a cross-species leap to humans was ultimately to blame. Official acceptance of this narrative would help shift blame for millions of deaths away from the communist Chinese regime, Peter Daszak's debarred EcoHealth Alliance, and the numerous American federal agencies that were involved with radical experimentation at the epicenter of the pandemic.

According to the Journal, when it came time for the intelligence community to present its findings to President Joe Biden, spy chiefs excluded the FBI — which had concluded with "moderate confidence" that a lab leak was the likely cause — from its Aug. 24, 2021, briefing along with damning genomic analysis from Pentagon scientists, which again pointed to human error.

Jason Bannan, a microbiologist who worked as a scientist at the FBI for nearly 20 years, told the Journal that his superiors primed him for the August intelligence community briefing with Biden but that he was never given the opportunity to offer what would have apparently been a contrasting view to the zoonotic origins narrative ultimately pushed by the director of national intelligence, former CIA Deputy Director Avril Haines.

A report earlier this year from Michael Shellenberger's investigative outfit, Public, indicated that the bureau possibly knew about a lab leak at the WIV as early as March 2020.

"The FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan," FBI Director Christopher Wray said in a February 2023 interview. "I will just make the observation that the Chinese government ... has been doing its best to try to thwart and obfuscate the work here, the work that we're doing, the work that our U.S. government and close foreign partners are doing. And that's unfortunate for everybody."

"Being the only agency that assessed that a laboratory origin was more likely, and the agency that expressed the highest level of confidence in its analysis of the source of the pandemic, we anticipated the FBI would be asked to attend the briefing," said Bannan. "I find it surprising that the White House didn't ask."

The champions of the zoonotic origin theory may have wanted to limit the bureau's presence at the briefing in order to maintain the credibility of their preferred narrative. After all, experts at the FBI apparently weren't playing ball.

'The scientists who had the subject matter expertise were silenced.'

The Journal indicated, for instance, that the National Intelligence Council prepared a chart for inclusion in its report to Biden that insinuated commonalities between the COVID-19 pandemic and past zoonotic outbreaks. However, FBI experts allegedly suggested that the chart betrayed a proper understanding of striking and critical differences between the new virus and past viruses, especially regarding their contagiousness.

Experts at the FBI also apparently ruffled feathers — particularly those of Adrienne Keen, a State Department official who served as a consultant to WHO but now works at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — by highlighting the thesis of a WIV scientist, Yu Ping, which indicated that the virus responsible for the pandemic was indigenous to the mountainous Yunnan province in the west of China. The trouble for proponents of the zoonotic origins theory was that the initial spread was not in Yunnan but nearly 1,000 miles away, in the neighborhood of the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Hubei province.

The insights of scientists at the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency were similarly poorly received and ultimately glossed over.

The Journal noted that John Hardham, Robert Cutlip, and Jean-Paul Chretien, whose 2020 paper challenging the zoonotic origin claim was quarantined, conduced a genomic analysis that showed that the virus had undergone meddling in a lab.

The trio, working at the DIA's National Center for Medical Intelligence, determined that the virus' spike protein was not a product of evolution but of human engineering, made using techniques developed at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and described in a 2008 paper — a telltale sign of gain-of-function experimentation.

Although the trio reportedly briefed their counterparts, including one of Bannan's partners at the FBI, Hardham, Cutlip and Chretien were ordered by a superior at the Center for Medical Intelligence Center in July 2021 to cut the FBI off from further disclosures about their work.

In addition to having their work siloed, the National Intelligence Council's briefing to the president reportedly excluded a number of the Pentagon scientists' proposed edits.

While it appears there was a desire for narrative conformity, a spokeswoman for the director of national intelligence's office suggested to the Journal that divergent viewpoints were fairly represented.

A source familiar with the investigation told the New York Post, "The scientists who had the subject matter expertise were silenced."

The NIC report that Haines and two of her senior analysts presented to Biden in August ultimately concluded with "low confidence" that the virus was the result of a cross-species leap and "was probably not genetically engineered."

"What ended up on the intelligence community's cutting-room floor needs to be re-examined," said Bannan.

The Journal suggested that politics was a factor in the approach taken to the competing theories both in Washingon, D.C., and in the scientific community. Then-President Donald Trump suggested in May 2020 that he had seen evidence that gave him a "high degree of confidence" that the virus originated in a Chinese lab.

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