CIA analysts kept quiet about COVID lab leaks to not agree with Trump, his former DNI says

Former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe said the intelligence community was not admitting that COVID-19 came from a lab in China because it did not want to side with Donald Trump.

Ratcliffe, who testified Tuesday morning before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, said he did not feel intelligence agencies were being completely truthful when it came to the origin of the virus.

The Trump-era DNI urged those within the intelligence community (IC) to “put politics aside” and “speak the truth about what happened” that led to the COVID-19 outbreak.

“The challenges faced by myself and other senior Trump administration officials during my tenure included legitimate concerns about our close sources and methods of intelligence, as well as unlawful roadblocks related to professional conflicts of interest and partisan politics,” he said. Ratcliffe during his opening. statement to the panel on Tuesday.

He said there is overwhelming evidence that COVID-19 was created and leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China.

He added that confusion was compounded “when a lab leak review was initially labeled false and reported with near unanimity as a conspiracy theory by conflicting science, scientists and by the mainstream press, while also censored as disinformation by giants of social media.”

Ratcliffe said the IC and Biden administration does not want to release evidence that the virus originated in China, both because it would confirm Trump’s claims and because it could have “huge geopolitical implications” with the Chinese Communist Party.

The testimony comes the day after another congressional report on the origin of the virus was published on Monday.

The 300-page report from a subcommittee of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee concluded that the pandemic was likely caused by at least two lab leaks from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Panelist Senator Roger Marshall, senior member of the Primary Health and Retirement Security Subcommittee, published the bombshell report, noting that there are no known naturally occurring incidents of COVID-19.

Marshall, a physician by profession, said the report is crucial to “exposing the deceit of those who tried to hide how this pandemic started.”

The report says the theory claiming COVID-19 jumped from animals to humans can no longer contain the “presumption of accuracy.”

Ratcliffe appeared at the hearing along with Trump-era State Department official David Feith, who was a deputy assistant secretary in the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, and Dr. Mark Lowenthal, who served as Assistant Director of Central Intelligence for Analysis and Production.

Trump was accused by Democrats at the hearing of fomenting racial hatred by calling the virus the “China virus” and “kung flu,” while claiming that the COVID-19 virus was created as a biological weapon in the lab in Wuhan

Despite years of trying to argue that the virus came from an agent other than a lab leak from Wuhan, China, Ratcliffe notes that three and a half years into the pandemic, the only conclusion that can be drawn is that it originated in the laboratory.

“Internally, national and electoral politics also influenced the analysis of our intelligence on China within the IC, as evidenced by the January 6, 2021 report by the Intelligence Community Analytical Ombudsperson,” Ratcliffe noted. As a non-political appeals official, the Ombudsman found that analysts seemed reluctant to let their analysis on China come forward because they tend to disagree with the policies of the Trump administration. support that policy,’ end of quote.’

But Ratcliffe says the CIA does have a conclusion, but refuses to release it simply because it would confirm Trump and the conservatives’ claims.

“To this day, the CIA, which in my opinion is without a doubt the world’s foremost espionage agency with an unparalleled ability to collect information, continues to claim that it does not have enough information to make a formal assessment,” he said. Ratcliffe.

“Basically, I think this is unjustifiable and reflective — not that the agency can’t make an assessment with any competency — but it won’t.”

He continued, “Some three and a half years later, the only plausible estimate the agency could make with any confidence was that a virus that killed more than a million Americans came from a Chinese lab, whose research included work for the Chinese military – and such an assessment would obviously have huge geopolitical implications that I don’t think the current government wants to face head-on.”

Democrats on the COVID-19 origin panel said at the hearing Tuesday that Trump was trying to stir up racial division by calling the coronavirus the “China Virus” and “Kung Flu,” something GOP panelist Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene vehemently claimed.