(Headline USA) The CIA attempted to pay off analysts in order to bury their findings on the origins of COVID-19, which tied the virus back to a lab in Wuhan, China, according to a whistleblower.
A senior-level CIA officer reportedly told the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic that at least six analysts informed the agency that COVID-19 likely originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The agency then attempted to bribe the analysts to change their positions and publicly say that COVID-19 originated naturally.
“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,” Reps. Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, and Mike Turner, R-Ohio, wrote in a letter to CIA Director William Burns on Tuesday.
“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,” the letter adds.
Wenstrup and Turner requested all documents, communications, and pay info from the CIA’s COVID Discovery Team by Sept. 26. They also asked for all communications between the CIA and other federal agencies, including the State Department, the FBI, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Energy Department.
In a statement, the CIA said the agency takes the allegations “very seriously.”
“At CIA we are committed to the highest standards of analytic rigor, integrity, and objectivity. We do not pay analysts to reach specific conclusions,” CIA Director of Public Affairs Tammy Kupperman Thorp said. “We take these allegations extremely seriously and are looking into them. We will keep our Congressional oversight committees appropriately informed.”
The FBI was the first federal agency to conclude that COVID-19 most likely spread as the result of a lab leak. The Energy Department later confirmed this finding.
