A sprawling final report by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic provokes questions over whether some in the scientific community -- including EcoHealth Alliance, the American nonprofit that collaborated on novel coronavirus discovery and engineering research with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and its president Peter Daszak -- could face criminal charges stemming from the COVID-19 tragedy.
The report's findings -- the culmination of two years of work by congressional investigators, the review of more than one million documents and dozens of transcribed interviews and public hearings -- include evidence that Daszak misled the committee on questions central to the COVID-19 origins mystery. Daszak exported gain-of-function coronavirus experiments to China; shirked his duty to probe his Wuhan colleagues for lab notebooks, viral samples and genomic data; and helped to falsely persuade millions that the idea of a Wuhan lab leak was a conspiracy theory, the committee's investigation shows.
Daszak did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In May 2024, the committee's investigation helped spur the Department of Health and Human Services to initiate debarment proceedings against EcoHealth and Daszak. The debarment process is not yet finished, but could result in EcoHealth and Daszak being ineligible for federal funding for a period of years. But the new revelations spur the possibility of criminal charges related to the COVID-19 pandemic as well, namely making false statements or perjury.
Among the report's most striking revelations: the Department of Justice empaneled a criminal grandy jury to investigate potential federal crimes related to the origins of COVID-19. The status of this grand jury investigation is not public. Though the DOJ dragnet ensnared EcoHealth, neither the nonprofit nor Daszak are the target of the DOJ investigation, EcoHealth's attorney told the committee.
A February 2023 email indicates that EcoHealth stayed mum on numerous nonpublic investigations.
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In a transcribed interview with the committee on June 16, 2023, Kristian Andersen, a virologist at the Scripps Research Institute, reported that agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation were asking questions about COVID-19 at a May 2023 virology conference.
While the Biden DOJ and FBI slow-played this investigation, Trump will have every incentive to see justice done.
Unless Joe Biden starts pardoning ev-er-y-one.
Which I think he might. Keith Olbermann is demanding 10,000,000 pardons for everyone on the political left:
You may say, "Oh, that's just old brokedown lunatic Keith Olbermann ranting as usual."
Well it is that, but Biden himself indicated that he was ready to start handing out pardons to any of his political or "business" cronies who might be prosecuted for his crimes:
No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter's cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son -- and that is wrong. There has been an effort to break Hunter -- who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution. In trying to break Hunter, they've tried to break me -- and there's no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough.
In other words: They came for my innocent drug-addict pervert short-eyes son Huntie, and that means they'll come for the rest of the Biden Crime Family. So start the pardon-printing machine.
I think Biden thinks that the Hunter Biden pardon is the most understandable pardon, so he's issuing it first. He thinks this will prepare the public for the mass issuance of pardons he has coming.
A couple of more pardon-related thoughts:
The Fifth Amendment gives you a right to refuse to answer questions if the answers may tend to incriminate you. But the Fifth Amendment no longer applies if you have immunity -- like a pardon -- for your crimes.
Hunter Biden can therefore be called before Congress to answer questions about his influence-peddling scheme, and his father's role in it, and has no legal right to refuse to answer. If he refuses to answer, that's obstruction of justice. If he lies, that's also obstruction of justice.
Note that Congress doesn't need a law-enforcement aim in its questioning. In fact, Congress may not conduct law-enforcement investigations. That's for the Executive. Congress just needs a plausible area about which they may seek to pass legislation -- such as creating rules and regulations for the scumbag sons of corrupt presidents from soliciting foreign bribes.
Biden may have done Huntie a disservice by pardoning him for everything, including child sex charges. (The pardon was plenary, so it includes that.) If Hunter could claim there was some undiscovered crime out there, he could refuse to answer under the 5th Amendment. But now that Joe Biden has cleared him of any prosecution, he may not.
And I suggest that Congress get on this, pronto.
Another thought is about Biden's many, many lies -- and the media's repetition of those lies. Watching those compilations of Biden denying he would pardon Hunter, I was reminded that Biden made those promises in explicit contrast to what he claimed was Trump's unlawfulness. Trump challenges his prosecutions; I welcome them. Trump argues that the DOJ is corrupt; I, on the other hand, have the strength of character to "trust the DOJ" even as it prosecutes my own son.
Well, we always knew that was a lie, and that Biden would pardon Huntie the moment the election was over.
Will the media now revisit its partisan propaganda about the great contrast between Biden's character and Trump's? They used this as a major, major propaganda offensive; will they now admit they were wrong? Or just lied, all along?
The media was very insistent that it was inconceivable that Biden secretly planned to pardon Hunter. That was a conspiracy theory pushed by MAGA zealots who wanted to bring Joe Biden down to Trump's low, base level.
But, once again, the "conspiracy theorists" were right, and the media, supposedly the fair and factual judge of all matters, once again took a Democrat's mere word as the uncontestable truth and lied to the nation.
Biden said that Trump must accept the prosecutions inflicted by the corrupt DOJ, because Biden's corrupt DOJ was incorruptible.
But now, to explain away pardoning his vile pervert bribery-collecting scumbag spawn, he himself says his DOJ is corrupt and engaged in a political war against him:
Today, I signed a pardon for my son Hunter. From the day I took office, I said I would not interfere with the Justice Department's decision-making, and I kept my word even as I have watched my son being selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted. Without aggravating factors like use in a crime, multiple purchases, or buying a weapon as a straw purchaser, people are almost never brought to trial on felony charges solely for how they filled out a gun form. Those who were late paying their taxes because of serious addictions, but paid them back subsequently with interest and penalties, are typically given non-criminal resolutions. It is clear that Hunter was treated differently.
The charges in his cases came about only after several of my political opponents in Congress instigated them to attack me and oppose my election. Then, a carefully negotiated plea deal, agreed to by the Department of Justice, unraveled in the court room -- with a number of my political opponents in Congress taking credit for bringing political pressure on the process. Had the plea deal held, it would have been a fair, reasonable resolution of Hunter's cases.
No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter's cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son -- and that is wrong.
This is, of course, all straight from Hunter Biden's lawyers, who have been arguing, bizarrely, for years that Hunter Biden's father was singling out Hunter Biden for a political prosecution.
The media maintained for years it was anti-American disinformation to suggest the DOJ was anything less than pure and incorruptible. Well, now Biden has stated that his DOJ is so corrupt it goes after his son to "break" Biden.
So why would Trump have any reason to trust it? If Biden's DOJ is politically corrupt in its prosecutions of Hunter Biden, surely it is even more biased in its prosecutions of Biden's political enemy Trump, no?
The media, of course, will not admit any of this, and will simply lie more and more, as it must. The DOJ is simon-pure when it prosecutes Trump, but rife with Trumpish corruption when it prosecutes a Biden.
Fugly voodoo doll Latrine John-Pissoir made that case to reporters today, insisting that Biden was telling the truth when he said the DOJ was incorruptible, and likewise telling the truth when he says it's rotten to the core: