CIA Sued for Allegedly Paying Off Analysts to Cover Up Covid Wuhan Lab Leak
Whistleblower accused agency of hiding records that show analysts took ‘monetary incentives’ to bury their findings.
Back in September, my Legal Insurrection colleague Mary Chastain reported that a senior-level Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) whistleblower claimed the agency tried to bribe him and other analysts to bury findings about COVID-19 spreading from a Wuhan lab leak.
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. 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.
Now, the CIA is being sued by a group wanting access to the records supporting those claims.
An offshoot of the conservative Heritage Foundation is suing the Central Intelligence Agency, accusing it of withholding records detailing payoffs to analysts to bury findings that a lab leak was the most likely explanation for the COVID-19 pandemic.
The think tank’s Oversight Project filed a federal lawsuit against the CIA Dec. 22, alleging the agency did not comply with its Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request about analysts who allegedly “received monetary incentives to change their position on the origins of the virus,” according to a copy of the complaint first reported Tuesday by the Daily Caller.
The suit in Washington, DC, federal court asks for “a preliminary and permanent injunction compelling” the CIA to expedite the production of records requested by Heritage within 20 days or “by such other date as the Court deems appropriate.”
“The Biden Administration has refused to be transparent with Congress and the American people over the origins of COVID-19,” said Kyle Brosnan, chief counsel for the Oversight Project.
The Oversight Project’s original FOIA request included access to the records connected to its team tasked with investigating the lab leak theory.
Heritage’s original FOIA request sought records from the creation of the discovery team and all records shared among team members associated with COVID-19’s origins. In addition, the conservative group demanded records of any financial bonuses and communications between discovery team members and officials from numerous agencies across the federal government.
The lawsuit asks the court to compel the CIA to produce all non-exempt records under Heritage’s prior FOIA request and to cover Heritage’s costs incurred.
As I would like to end the holiday season with some good news, it turns out that the concerns over another lab leak causing a pandemic have throttled the funding for virology research projects.
At Pennsylvania State University, a proposal to infect ferrets with a mutant bird flu virus passed the federal government’s most rigorous biosafety review only to be rebuffed by the National Institutes of Health. Troy Sutton, the scientist behind the studies, said that health officials referred to the public controversy over the lab leak theory in advising him to pursue different experiments.
In Washington, international development officials pulled the plug this summer on a $125 million program to collect animal viruses on several continents after two senior Republican senators demanded that they end the project.
And elsewhere in the United States, nearly two dozen virologists, some of whom spoke anonymously for fear of jeopardizing funding or career prospects, described a professionwide retreat from sensitive experiments. Some said that they had stopped proposing such work because research plans were languishing in long and opaque government reviews. One virologist said that university administrators had asked him to remove his name from a study done with colleagues in China.
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Comments
Very interesting. I suspect that the records they seek are stored in the same location as Hillary Clinton’s 30,000 missing emails.
…and the truth is sequestered in a tract of land in Arkansas.
About time for the gallows. No wonder “they” are afraid of Trump
Every time my tinfoil hat publicly opines that the US intelligence community is the actual seat of the Deep State, people assume I’ve gone over the edge. It started with JFK, and didn’t end there. They got away with everything, every time; why does anyone think they would have any incentive to stop?
We are still in the dark RE: JFK and the Kennedy clan.
Ask RFK Jr. how in the dark he still is.
In the bathroom? With the wipes?
It’s probably not so much the concern about a lab leak as it is complete and total distrust of everyone in the field, since they pretty much all (but for a small handful) colluded and lied and turned America inside-out for their selfish, destructive, criminal reasons.
The entire field of virology turned against America, in order to save their own little projects and to help communist China, along with basking in the glow of the criminal petit tyrants who popped up all over the US.
And, still, no one has gone to jail over any of the innumerable crimes and lies and deceits and insanity they committed while the Wuhan virus gave them the opportunity. And there are so, so many of them who deserve to rot in prison – from the rotten head of the fish, Traitor Joe, all the way down to those who carried out the illegal dictats. And they’re still doing it.
Pardon my apparently unscientific mind but why would anyone want to do that? Are ferrets feeling discriminated against for not having their own virus? Is this trip really necessary?
Every time I read Rand Paul’s (or someone else’s in earlier years) list of wasteful government spending, including numerous federal grants for “scientific” studies whose very premises boggle the imagination, I ask the very same question.
Ferrets are used in experiments with respiratory viruses because they catch and transmit human viruses. Their respiratory tract also resembles humans’. As the Understanding Animal Research site goes on to say:
“The ferret is closer biologically and physiologically to humans than the mouse or the rat.”
That tells us about the ferret. What does that tell us about us?
Sorry, life’s not fair, ferret.
There is, I presume, zero chance a case like this would ever make it to discovery? There are simply too many powerful stakeholders that would have too much to lose if this kind of dirty laundry was aired in public.
I never bought the allegedly “accidental” lab leak theory. The timing is simply too perfect, with the virus arriving on U.S. shores at the end of 2019, or, the beginning of 2020, when President Trump is cruising to an easy re-election.
The Wuhan virus was an intentional biological attack by China on the west, made as an experiment, to gauge western leaders’ reaction (predictably emasculated, feckless, meek and cowed), and, the with the overarching goal of sabotaging President Trump’s easy re-election.
The Chinese communist regime shrewdly read the room; took note of the vile and lawless Dhimmi-crats’ (Obama, Clinton, FBI, et al.) utterly insane, off-the-charts and unprecedented sabotage and subversion of then-candidate, and, later President Trump’s, campaign and Administration; and, realized that it could manipulate the situation to its long-term advantage, by installing an utterly corrupt, dim-witted, pliable, compromised and malleable dotard in the White House geriatric ward, in crime boss and tottering fool, Biden.
Absolutely. The truth must die, and I’m thinking Grandpa Joe will outlive Trump.
Spot on! But some lib dem judge somewhere will declare “lack of standing” – we see a lot of those lately – and the case never sees the light of day.
Why hold back? Tell us how you really feel!
Just sued? There should be criminal charges.
and who’s gonna do that, Garland?
Wuhan-developed with CIA assistance.
Do they think we are stupid?
Maybe CIA means Chinese Intelligence in America. Headquartered in Langley.