WSJ: The "Intelligence" Community Knew or Should Have Known Covid-19 Was Made in the Wuhan Lab

The "intelligence" agencies acted as de facto propaganda ministries for China in willfully covering up for that communist country.

Behind Closed Doors: The Spy-World Scientists Who Argued Covid Was a Lab Leak

The idea that the pandemic's origins lie with a research facility in China was once labeled a conspiracy theory

By Michael R. Gordon and Warren P. Strobel

The first anecdote: The White House summoned the four "intelligence" agencies which claimed that there was a "low confidence" finding that covid had evolved naturally.

The FBI, which had concluded with "moderate confidence" that the virus was created at the Wuhan lab, was pointedly not invited to brief the president or air its findings at the White House.

A car and driver had been readied to whisk Jason Bannan from FBI headquarters early one morning in August 2021 to brief the White House on a novel virus that was killing hundreds of thousands of Americans and had stopped the world in its tracks. Bannan had been told by his superiors to be on hand in case the Federal Bureau of Investigation was asked to join a top intelligence community briefing for the president. But the White House summons never came.

...

The dominant view within the intelligence community was clear when Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, and a couple of her senior analysts, briefed Biden and his top aides on Aug. 24. The National Intelligence Council, a body of senior intelligence officers who reported to Haines and that organized the intelligence review, had concluded with "low confidence" that Covid-19 had emerged when the virus leapt from an animal to a human. So did four intelligence agencies.
Avril Haines, director of national intelligence, leaving the Capitol after a House briefing two years ago in Washington.

At the time, the FBI was the only agency that concluded a lab leak was likely, a judgment it had rendered with "moderate confidence." But neither Bannan nor any other FBI officials were at the briefing to make their case first hand to the president.

"Being the only agency that assessed that a laboratory origin was more likely, and the agency that expressed the highest level of confidence in its analysis of the source of the pandemic, we anticipated the FBI would be asked to attend the briefing," Bannan recalled in his first on-the-record interview on the subject. "I find it surprising that the White House didn't ask."

I don't find that surprising at all. A cover-up of this size requires plausible deniability. You want to be able to say that the senile president heard no evidence that the virus was created by China.

The scumbags in the government of course insist there was no problem whatsoever in not inviting the only dissident voices.

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But an investigation by The Wall Street Journal shows that the disagreements among intelligence experts over what should be included in the report ran deeper than is publicly known. Nor were the FBI scientists the only ones who believed that the intelligence directorate's review didn't tell the whole story.

Three scientists at the National Center for Medical Intelligence, part of the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency, conducted a scientific study that concluded that Covid-19 was manipulated in a laboratory in a risky research effort. But that analysis was at odds with the assessment of their parent agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and wasn't incorporated in the report presented to Biden.

The DIA Inspector General launched an inquiry into whether this report was suppressed.

You can't read the findings of that IG report, because they're being suppressed.

Plot twist.

The DIA Inspector General's office opened an inquiry in the spring into whether the scientists' assessment was mishandled or suppressed, people familiar with the matter said. A spokesman for the agency declined to comment on whether this inquiry was continuing, had been completed and what it might have included.

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'Off the reservation'

As the FBI continued to push to ensure the lab theory was taken seriously, there were also debates at the Defense Intelligence Agency, which houses the main U.S. government organization dedicated to medical intelligence. The National Center for Medical Intelligence looks at health threats around the world that might endanger U.S. troops, such as infectious diseases and biological weapons.

Three scientists there--John Hardham, Robert Cutlip and Jean-Paul Chretien--conducted a genomic analysis that concluded that the virus had been manipulated in a laboratory. Specifically they concluded that a segment of the "spike protein" that enables the virus to gain entry into human cells was constructed using techniques developed in the Wuhan lab that were described in a 2008 Chinese scientific paper. That was an indication, they argued, that the Chinese scientists were conducting "gain of function" research to see if the virus could infect humans.

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They briefed their counterparts, including one of Bannan's partners, an FBI agent with a Ph.D., on their initial findings. But in July 2021 they were instructed by a superior at the medical intelligence center not to continue sharing their work with the FBI, which they were told was "off the reservation," according to people familiar with the matter. That order was earlier reported by The Australian.

Nor were all of their proposed edits to the National Intelligence Council report accepted.

Hardham, Cutlip and Chretien also wrote an unclassified May 2020 paper that challenged the "proximal origin" assessment. They weren't allowed to circulate it outside of the medical intelligence center, but it leaked three years later and was entered into the record by Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R., Ohio) when he chaired a hearing on the pandemic for a House committee investigating the virus's origin.

Read the whole thing. It's a criminal cover up and full-on conspiracy, and the conspiracy is going to be exposed during Trump's second presidency.

posted by Ace at 12:26 PM

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