The head of the U.S. intelligence community committed to sharing with Congress the Energy Department’s classified assessment concluding that COVID-19 most likely originated through a Wuhan lab leak.
Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines was the first U.S. official to publicly confirm the new assessment leaning in favor of the Chinese lab leak hypothesis during a Wednesday hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee, and she went further on Thursday by committing to sharing the bombshell assessment, in classified form, with the House Intelligence Committee.
WHERE THINGS STAND IN WUHAN LAB LEAK DEBATE
The Energy Department’s assessment in favor of a lab leak is the first movement since the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released an assessment in 2021 stating that one U.S. intelligence agency — now known to be the FBI — assessed with "moderate confidence" that COVID-19 most likely emerged from a lab in Wuhan, while four U.S. spy agencies and the National Intelligence Council believed with just "low confidence" that COVID-19 most likely had a natural origin.
Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-OH), chairman of the House Select Committee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, told Haines on Thursday that “it’s my understanding that the DOE would be willing to show us their underlying report, especially their updated report, but since ODNI owns the assessment you have to approve that.”
Haines replied, “On the DOE assessment, absolutely, I suspect it would have to be in classified form; I’m sure it’s a classified report, but more than happy to share any final assessment that they’ve done if they are comfortable with it. I can’t imagine myself standing in the way.”
Wenstrup also argued that “finding the origins of covid is important” and said he had repeatedly asked ODNI who the intelligence community spoke to during the assessments of COVID-19’s origins, asking Haines to share that information. Haines pushed back.
“One problem for us is that we obviously want to be able to consult with outside expertise … in fields related to COVID-19,” Haines said, adding that these outside experts often “do not want to be known as consulting with the intelligence community.”
Wenstrup said he was talking about Haines sharing that in a classified setting, emphasizing that “we need to know who they are” to understand better why certain spy agency elements had landed where they have.
Haines declined to share the names of the outside experts even in a classified setting, but told the congressman that “if there is anybody that you want us to talk to who you feel like we haven’t, I commit to you that we will absolutely take those names and we will ensure that we are consulting with them as well.”
The spy chief confirmed the day prior that the Energy Department “has changed its view slightly — with low confidence it says that a lab leak is most likely, but they do so for different reasons than the FBI does, and their assessments are not identical.”
FBI Director Christopher Wray noted at that hearing, as he had last week, that “the FBI has long assessed, going all the way back to the summer of 2021, that the origin of the pandemic was likely a lab incident in Wuhan.”
Haines added that intelligence community elements could change their perspectives if they gain access to “additional information” and insisted that the agencies have been trying to collect it. She repeatedly noted that China “has not fully cooperated” and called it “a key critical gap.”
Former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, who has long insisted that the intelligence is strong that COVID-19 originated at a Wuhan lab, called it “utter nonsense” to claim that the CIA doesn’t have enough information to reach a conclusion on natural origin versus lab leak.
“The real problem is, the only assessment the agency could make — which is that a virus that killed over a million Americans originated in a CCP-controlled lab whose research included work for the Chinese military — has enormous geopolitical implications that the Biden administration does not want to face head-on,” Ratcliffe wrote for Fox News on Thursday.
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Scientists consulting with the U.S. government early in the pandemic in 2020 believed COVID-19 originating from a lab in Wuhan was possible or even likely. Still, emails indicate Dr. Anthony Fauci and then-NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins worked to shut the hypothesis down. Emails also show Fauci and others "prompted" an influential scientific paper that pushed back on the Wuhan lab leak hypothesis in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic.
Meanwhile, the Chinese government has continued to deflect from the Wuhan lab leak possibility by pushing the baseless conspiracy theory that COVID-19 originated from a U.S. military base, including repeatedly this week.