Two Ohio congressmen, Reps. Brad Wenstrup and Mike Turner, outlined this "new and concerning" revelation in a Sept. 12 letter to CIA Director William Burns. Wenstrup heads the House COVID-19 Select Subcommittee, while Turner heads the House Intelligence Committee. Their letter to Burns shared the testimony of a "multi-decade, senior-level, current [CIA] officer."
"According to the whistleblower, the [CIA] assigned seven officers to a COVID Discovery Team [that] consisted of multi-disciplinary and experienced officers with significant scientific expertise," the two wrote. "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." (Related: BIOWARFARE ON AMERICANS: RFK Jr. says CIA was directly involved in funding COVID research for Wuhan lab.)
Tammy Kupperman Thorp, the CIA's public affairs director, responded to the Republicans' letter in a statement given to the New York Post.
"At CIA, we are committed to the highest standards of analytic rigor, integrity, and objectivity. We do not pay analysts to reach specific conclusions," she said. "We take these allegations extremely seriously and are looking into them. We will keep our congressional oversight committees appropriately informed.
Ratcliffe: Lab leak theory the only reasonable explanation
Given the whistleblower testimony, Wenstrup and Turner also requested several documents from the CIA to aid with Congress' probe on the matter – with a Sept. 26 deadline.
Among the documents requested are the team's communications between different departments such as the Department of State, Department of Health and Human Services and Department of Energy (DOE) regarding the origins of COVID-19. Documents regarding the pay history of the COVID Discovery Team in all its iterations, including the awarding of any type of financial or performance-based incentives or financial bonuses are also requested.
The Post also reported that both congressmen identified former CIA Chief Operating Officer Andrew Makridis as having "played a central role" in the agency's COVID-19 investigation. In a separate letter, they invited Makridis to participate in a transcribed interview on Sept. 26. The former CIA staffer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation was the first U.S. intelligence agency to presume the COVID-19 pandemic most probably started with a lab leak. In February, the DOE also assumed that a lab leak was possible based on the latest intelligence at the time.
Later in April, former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe told Congress that the lab leak theory was the "only" credible explanation for the pandemic.
"My informed assessment as a person with as much access as anyone to our government’s intelligence … has been and continues to be that a lab leak is the only explanation," he told the House COVID-19 Select Subcommittee during a hearing. Ratcliffe added that such a theory is "credibly supported by [U.S.] intelligence, by science and by common sense."
"If our intelligence and evidence supporting a lab leak was placed side by side with our intelligence and evidence pointing to a natural origins or spillover theory, the lab leak side of the ledger would be long, convincing, even overwhelming – while the spillover side would be nearly empty and tenuous."
Visit Conspiracy.news for more stories about the COVID-19 lab leak theory.
Watch this clip from the New York Post about the whistleblower's allegation of the CIA bribing analysts to suppress the COVID-19 lab leak theory.
This video is from the GalacticStorm channel on Brighteon.com.
More related stories:
New study shows chances that COVID-19 has a natural origin are less than 1 in 100 million.
Sen. Tom Cotton says China destroyed evidence about covid lab leak to bury "smoking gun."
Three scientists from Wuhan lab identified as first carriers of COVID-19.
Sources include:
Oversight.House.gov [PDF]
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