CIA scientists came to believe that the coronavirus that brought the world to its knees was likely leaked from a Chinese lab, but agency higher-ups — aided by Dr. Anthony Fauci — suppressed those arguments, then punished the analysts who tried to disagree, an agency whistleblower told Congress on Wednesday.
As early as Aug. 12, 2021, the agency was considering publicly calling the virus a lab leak. But five days later, that had changed, and the CIA has refused to say why, according to James Erdman III, a career CIA operations officer who just completed a study of COVID-19 for the director of National Intelligence.
He said some in the CIA seemed to be too eager to make excuses for China, and some antipathy toward President Trump may also have fueled the agency’s resistance to the possibility that the virus sprang from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The result, he told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, was a “cover-up, wasted resources and a failure to properly inform policymakers.”
“I didn’t find any smoking gun where they said ’We’ve got to cover this up,’” he said. “I think you get enough people shouting something down, it gets shouted down.”
He blamed a cesspool of cross-pollination, with scientists getting money from the government for their research, then called in to serve as the experts when that government goes looking for answers after something went wrong.
That included Dr. Fauci, who, he said, was shaping the experts the CIA...
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