Re: Biden CIA accused of hiding records that analysts took 'monetary incentives' to bury COVID lab leak finding

[Bribin' Joe]

On 29 Dec 2023, tRUMP VERMIN <el...@protonmail.com> posted some
news:umns04$11765$1...@dont-email.me:

> China Joe Biden took a payoff from his Chinese pals just like Obama
> did.

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.

“A CIA whistleblower has made serious allegations that the agency bought
off employees of the agency to further obstruct efforts to get to the
truth of the virus’s origins. This obstruction cannot stand and we’re
fighting in federal court to get to the bottom of this.”

A senior-level CIA agent told House Republican committee chairmen in
September that the agency offered payments to six analysts tasked with
determining the origins of SARS-CoV-2 if they said that the virus jumped
from animals to humans.

The Sept. 12 letter from Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic
Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) and Permanent Select Committee on
Intelligence Chairman Mike Turner (R-Ohio) to CIA Director William Burns
also demanded documentation and communications about the payments.

“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 House panel chairmen wrote to
Burns.

“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,” they added of
the analyst group, which included “experienced officers with significant
scientific expertise.”

The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project filed its FOIA request for
records related to the internal CIA analysis on Sept. 20 — but has yet
to receive the documents or an explanation for the delay, the complaint
states.

Wenstrup has since alleged that the former director of the National
Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci, was
secretly “escorted” into CIA headquarters to “influence” the findings of
those analysts at one point.

In February, the FBI became the first US intelligence agency to conclude
the coronavirus pandemic most likely began with a lab leak.

The Energy Department delivered the same assessment that same month,
citing new intelligence.

But months later, in a 10-page report, the entire US intelligence
community, which includes those agencies along with others, declassified
its COVID origins findings, which had most “agencies assess that
SARS-CoV-2 was not genetically engineered.”

The report, however, found “biosafety concerns” and “genetic
engineering” took place at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where
several scientists became sick in the fall of 2019 with symptoms
“consistent with but not diagnostic of COVID-19.”

A Government Accountability Office report in June found that US
taxpayers footed the bill for more than $2 million of risky
gain-of-function research with coronaviruses at the Wuhan lab, made
possible through grants provided by the National Institutes of Health,
which included Fauci’s NIAID, and the United States Agency for
International Development.

Fauci is scheduled to sit for a deposition with the House COVID
subcommittee on Jan. 8 and 9, 2024, to answer questions about his
handling of inquiries about the US public health response and to
“address the numerous controversies that have arisen during and after
the pandemic,” according to Wenstrup.

John Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence under former
president Donald Trump, testified before Congress earlier this year that
the “lab leak theory” was the “only” credible explanation for the
pandemic.

“My informed assessment as a person with as much access as anyone to our
government’s intelligence … has been and continues to be that a lab leak
is the only explanation credibly supported by our intelligence, by
science and by common sense,” Ratcliffe told members of the House Select
Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic in April.

“If our intelligence and evidence supporting a lab leak was placed side
by side with our intelligence and evidence pointing to a natural origins
or spillover theory, the lab leak side of the ledger would be long,
convincing, even overwhelming — while the spillover side would be nearly
empty and tenuous.”

The COVID-19 pandemic has claimed the lives of nearly 7 million people
across the globe, according to the World Health Organization.

https://nypost.com/2023/12/26/news/cia-accused-of-hiding-payments-to-bury
-covid-lab-leak-report/