The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project is suing the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for refusing to comply with a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request involving the spook agency’s Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) lab leak theory investigation.
According to the suit, the CIA bribed six of its seven COVID Discovery Team members to pretend as though they believed COVID came from bat soup at a Chinese wet market rather than from a bioweapons laboratory in Wuhan, China.
A senior-level CIA agent who has worked at the agency for several decades reportedly came forward to blow the whistle on the scandal, which is explained as follows in the legal complaint:
“The Team consisted of multi-disciplinary and experienced officers with significant scientific expertise. According to the whistleblower, at the end of its review, six of the seven members of the Team believed the intelligence and science were sufficient to make a low confidence assessment that COVID-19 originated from a laboratory in Wuhan, China. The seventh member of the Team, who also happened to be the most senior, was the lone officer to believe COVID-19 originated through zoonosis. The whistleblower further contends that to come to the eventual public determination of uncertainty, the other six members were given a significant monetary incentive to change their position.”
COVID: the gift that keeps on giving
The complaint goes on to explain that the FOIA request was made to the CIA in accordance with 5 U.S.C. § 552, which legally compels the CIA to release all records related to the allegations that the agency’s COVID Discovery Team members were bribed to say what the CIA wanted them to say rather than what they actually believed.
On Sept. 12, 2023, COVID Select Subcommittee Chairman Brad Wenstrup and Rep. Mike Turner, Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, also wrote a letter to CIA Director William Burns asking him for information related to the allegations.
“Heritage’s original FOIA request sought records from the creation of the discovery team and all records shared among team members associated with COVID-19’s origins,” one independent media outlet reported about the scandal.
“In addition, the conservative group demanded records of any financial bonuses and communications between discovery team members and officials from numerous agencies across the federal government.”
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