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How CIA Management Failed During the COVID-19 Pandemic

This is all you need to know about Washington’s poisonous partisanship: Not a single Senate Democratic senator showed up for a major Senate oversight hearing on the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the role of senior officials of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in formulating America’s flawed response to the deadliest global pandemic since the 1918 flu.  

Senator Rand Paul, R-Ky., chair of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, observed, “For years, Americans were told to stop asking questions about COVID’s origins. Today, a whistleblower with firsthand knowledge will testify that intelligence officials may have buried evidence, altered conclusions, and concealed the truth from the public.”

The whistleblower, James Erdman III, a career CIA operative, revealed in sworn Senate testimony how CIA management participated in undercutting the initial career staff assessment on the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic in China. While Erdman appeared voluntarily before the Committee, and previously in executive session, he was also the recipient of a formal subpoena.

It was a blockbuster event. Erdman told the Committee that in August of 2021, CIA team of experts had assessed that the pandemic originated as a lab leak. In 2022, he told the Senate, there were 10 CIA analysts who did the review of the origins issue, and seven of them who had scientific expertise assessed the coronavirus as the product of a lab leak. In 2023, the team did a reassessment, and six of the seven technical experts in the CIA task force still assessed that the pandemic was the product of a laboratory leak.  In fact, during the entire period between 2021 and 2023, CIA staff assessed that a Chinese lab leak was the most likely source of the global pandemic. 

Biden-era CIA management, however, changed the final report to read that the agency could not “know precisely” whether the deadly coronavirus was the product of a lab leak. That estimate remained in place as the official CIA position until the Trump administration reversed it, and the CIA position became formally aligned with the previous assessments of scientists at the Department of Energy and the analysts of the Federal Bureau of........

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