The Heritage Foundation is suing the CIA for records relating to the CIA’s investigation into the origins of COVID-19 following new allegations that the agency paid off its investigators to change their conclusions about the source of the virus’s outbreak.
The Oversight Project—a government accountability watchdog launched by the conservative think tank—originally began looking into the alleged bribes in September after a current CIA senior officer turned whistleblower and alerted Congress to the alleged payoffs.
According to the complaint, first shared with the Daily Caller, the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project initially filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request on Sept. 20, but the intelligence agency failed to either provide the requested documents or explain why it could not turn over the records within the normal 20-business-day timeline provided under FOIA.
The U.S. intelligence community has remained divided over the origins of COVID-19, particularly whether the virus outbreak began naturally as a result of animal-to-human contact, or whether the virus was first genetically modified from its zoonotic origins.
The FBI has concluded with “moderate confidence” that the virus’s outbreak could have been caused by a leak from a virology lab in Wuhan, China.
The U.S. Department of Energy has reached a similar conclusion, albeit with “low confidence.”
Other components of the intelligence community have released their own assessments, supporting the natural exposure outbreak theory. The CIA and some other intelligence community agencies, by contrast, remain inconclusive about both leading theories of COVID-19’s origins.
According to the CIA whistleblower’s testimony before the House Oversight Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic in September, the agency initially assigned seven officers to its COVID Discovery Team.
The seven members brought together a multi-disciplinary background that included “significant scientific expertise,” according to subcommittee Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio).
Senior Investigator Disagreed
According to Mr. Wenstrup, the CIA whistleblower alleged that six of the seven investigators on the CIA team initially reached a “low confidence” assessment that the lab leak theory was the more likely cause of the COVID-19 outbreak, while the seventh CIA investigator—who happened to be the most senior member of the investigative team—was the lone supporter of the natural origin theory.
“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,” Mr. Wenstrup wrote in a Sept. 12 letter to CIA Director William Burns.
The Oversight Project’s initial FOIA request sought all CIA records about the formation of its COVID Discovery Team, the team’s deliberations, and the team’s payment history, including whether there were discussions of any type of financial or performance-based incentives or bonuses related to their work.
The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic has sought similar information from the CIA following the whistleblower allegations.
“These allegations, from a seemingly credible source, requires the Committees to conduct further oversight of how the CIA handled its internal investigation into the origins of COVID-19,” Mr. Wenstrup wrote at the time.
Agency: We Don’t Pay for Specific Findings
After the whistleblower came forward with his allegations in September, the CIA told The Epoch Times that it does not pay its analysts to reach specific conclusions.
“We take these allegations extremely seriously and are looking into them,” the agency said at the time. “We will keep our congressional oversight committees appropriately informed.”
NTD News reached out to the CIA for comment on this latest FOIA lawsuit but did not receive a response by press time.
“A CIA whistleblower has made serious allegations that the agency bought off employees of the agency to further obstruct efforts to get to the truth of the virus’s origins,” Oversight Project chief counsel Kyle Brosnan told the New York Post on Dec. 26.
“This obstruction cannot stand and we’re fighting in federal court to get to the bottom of this.”
