CIA Sued for Allegedly Paying Off Analysts to Cover Up Covid Wuhan Lab Leak
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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