The CIA Attempted to Bribe Analysts to Bury Lab Leak Findings, Agency Whistleblower Says
Did CIA brass try to bribe their own analysts to hide what they don’t want the American people to know? It certainly appears that way.
The New York Post on Tuesday released a bombshell report claiming that a CIA whistleblower has come forward alleging the Agency tried to bury finding that a lab leak was the most likely cause of the Covid-19 pandemic by offering analysts a bribe.
A senior-level CIA officer told House committee leaders that his agency tried to pay off six analysts who found SARS-CoV-2 likely originated in a Wuhan lab if they changed their position and said the virus jumped from animals to humans, according to a letter sent Tuesday to CIA Director William Burns.
Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) and Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Mike Turner (R-Ohio) requested all documents, communications and pay info from the CIA’s COVID Discovery Team by Sept. 26.
“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 House panel chairmen wrote.
The word bribe doesn’t actually appear in the report, but the allegations certainly meet the standard definition—”to persuade (someone) to act in one's favor, typically illegally or dishonestly, by a gift of money or other inducement.”
The allegations are shocking, but journalist David Zweig, a writer for The Atlantic and New York magazine, was unsurprised.
“Last month, David Asher––the man who led the State Department's Covid origins investigation––told me there was a ‘massive coverup’ about the virus origin,” tweeted Zweig.
In the interview, which can be read in full at Zweig’s newsletter Silent Lunch, Asher alleges “a massive coverup spanning from China to DC” on the origins of Covid-19.
The reason we don’t have a clearer answer on the pandemic’s origin—beyond the fact that there is much evidence already gathered that is not being analyzed or made public—Asher said, is because those in power want it that way. There are too many officials in too many government agencies who would be implicated in a lab leak, not to mention how it would complicate our relationship with China. “Our own state department told us ‘don’t get near this thing, it’ll blow up in your face,’” he told me.
“We may never know” is a policy preference of many people, Asher said. “It protects everyone. It’s a convenient obscurity.”
It’s becoming increasingly difficult to deny what is happening hear. They know the truth. And they don’t want you to know.
Now, if you doubt the CIA would bribe its own analysts to cover up the truth, let me blunt: you don’t know the history of The Agency.
If you want a little taste, well … just recall the dying words of James Angleton, the righthand man of longtime CIA director Allen Dulles.
Whether readers choose to believe or not, they can read the document’s allegations below and determine for themselves if CIA brass tried to bribe their own analysts to hide what they don’t want the American people to know.