(Ken Silva, Headline USA) In October 2021, CNN revealed that the FBI thought that the COVID-19 disease had leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.
At the time, the news was a game-changer for the public discourse about the origins of COVID. People who had been censored, deplatformed and derided as conspiracy theorists were validated by an “official” source.
However, a report on Tuesday revealed that the FBI knew about the origin of COVID since at least March 2020. That would mean that FBI Director Chris Wray and other officials likely kept that information from former President Donald Trump, as well as the wider public.
According to the report from journalists Michael Shellenberger and Alex Gutentag, a Chinese national from Wuhan, working as an FBI informant, told their handler at the bureau’s Chinese Intelligence Squad. The report cited unnamed sources who reportedly said it was probable that the whole squad of 25 people knew.
“A person working at the Virology Institute lab in Wuhan, China was infected, left the building, and spread the virus outside the lab in Wuhan,” the FBI informant said, according to a source. “It didn’t have anything to do with the wet market or the bat soup story they were going with.”
The sources also reportedly said that the FBI trusted the informant because the person’s information had been corroborated at least three times previously.
“The [informant] was from Wuhan, had been vetted, and the person had provided information on three prior occasions that they were able to corroborate as true and reliable,” an unnamed person told Shellenberger and Gutentag.
In an interview with Fox News last February, Director Wray said his bureau “has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan.”
Wray reportedly said at the time that the FBI has a team of experts who focus specifically on the risk of biological threats that come into the “wrong hands,” including by a “hostile nation state.”
“You’re talking about a potential leak from a Chinese government-controlled lab that killed millions of Americans,” Wray told Fox.
Wray reportedly added that most details of the FBI’s investigation remain classified, and that it has been difficult to work with the Chinese government on investigating the pandemic’s origin.
“I will just make the observation that the Chinese government, it seems to me, has been doing its best to try to thwart and obfuscate the work here,” he reportedly said. “The work that our US government and close foreign partners are doing. And that’s unfortunate for everybody.”
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.
