The Heritage Foundation is suing the CIA for records relating to its investigation into the origins of COVID-19, following new allegations that the agency paid off its investigators to change their conclusions about the source of the virus’s outbreak.
The U.S. intelligence community has remained divided over the origins of COVID-19, particularly whether the virus outbreak began naturally as a result of animal-to-human contact, or whether the virus was first genetically modified from its zoonotic origins.
The FBI has concluded with “moderate confidence” that the virus’s outbreak could’ve been caused by a leak from a virology lab in Wuhan, China.
The U.S. Department of Energy has reached a similar conclusion, albeit with “low confidence.”
Other components of the intelligence community have released their own assessments, supporting the natural exposure outbreak theory. The CIA and some other intelligence community agencies, by contrast, remain inconclusive about both leading theories of COVID-19’s origins.
According to the CIA whistleblower’s testimony before the House Oversight Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic in September, the agency initially assigned seven officers to its COVID Discovery Team.
Senior Investigator Disagreed
According to Mr. Wenstrup, the CIA whistleblower alleged that six of the seven investigators on the CIA team initially reached a “low confidence” assessment that the lab leak theory was the more likely cause of the COVID-19 outbreak, while the seventh CIA investigator—also the most senior member of the investigative team—was the lone supporter of the natural origin theory.“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,” Mr. Wenstrup wrote in a Sept. 12 letter to CIA Director William Burns.
The Oversight Project’s initial FOIA request sought all CIA records about the formation of its COVID Discovery Team, the team’s deliberations, and the team’s payment history, including whether there were discussions of any type of financial or performance-based incentives or bonuses related to their work.
The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic has sought similar information from the CIA following the whistleblower allegations.
Agency: We Don’t Pay for Specific Findings
After the whistleblower came forward with his allegations in September, the CIA told The Epoch Times that it doesn’t pay its analysts to reach specific conclusions.“We take these allegations extremely seriously and are looking into them,” the agency said at the time. “We will keep our congressional oversight committees appropriately informed.”
CIA officials didn’t respond by press time to a request by NTD News for comment.
“This obstruction cannot stand, and we’re fighting in federal court to get to the bottom of this.”
