BREAKING: Biden admin covered up intel revelations of COVID-19 lab origins: WSJ report

Biden administration officials suppressed information that was obtained by intelligence agencies that supported the Covid-19 "lab-leak" theory, according to a new report from the Wall Street Journal. The report showed that there is evidence of a cover-up as to the origins of the virus and that the spike protein that enables the Covid virus to infiltrate cells was lab made.

A Wall Street Journal investigation found that Jason Bannan, a Ph.D.in microbiology, was recruited by the FBI after the 9/11 attacks in order to bring expertise on topics such as biological and chemical weapons. He was told by superiors that he would be brought in to brief President Joe Biden when the Covid-19 virus was rampant in the US in 2021. 

However, he was never summoned to join the briefings with Biden. Out of the multiple agencies that investigated the origin of the pandemic, the FBI was the only agency to determine that there was a "moderate confidence" that it came from a lab. The four other departments said that the pandemic had an animal origin, but each had "low confidence" in their findings, per the outlet.  

Biden was briefed by National Intelligence Director Avril Haines in August 2021 after a 90-day review that the White House had ordered to investigate the origins of the virus starting in May that year. However, the FBI was not asked to attend the meeting. The other four agencies attended and told the president that the pandemic had come from an animal.  

"Being the only agency that assessed that a laboratory origin was more likely, and the agency that expressed the highest level of confidence in its analysis of the source of the pandemic, we anticipated the FBI would be asked to attend the briefing,” Bannan said in a recorded interview. “I find it surprising that the White House didn’t ask.” 

The Director of National Intelligence (DIA) told the outlet that it was no standard practice to invite representatives from each agency and that each view on the pandemic was represented in the meeting Biden.  

“The Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the National Intelligence Council’s work on Covid-19 origins complied with all of the Intelligence Community’s analytic standards, including objectivity,” a spokesperson said. 

However, the investigation from the WSJ discovered that officials in the Biden administration tried to keep information about the theory that the pandemic came from a lab from going public and it was not just FBI officials that thought Covid-19 came from a lab. 

"Three scientists at the National Center for Medical Intelligence, part of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency, conducted a scientific study that concluded that Covid-19 was manipulated in a laboratory in a risky research effort. But that analysis was at odds with the assessment of their parent agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and wasn’t incorporated in the report presented to Biden," the Wall Street Journal reported.  

The reasoning for why the report was left out sparked an investigation from the DIA Inspector General’s office, to see if the report was suppressed or mishandled, the outlet reported. The IG office declined to comment on the status of the investigation.  

In addition to this instance of the information not getting brought up in briefings to address Covid-19's origin, Adrienne Keen, a State Department official, advocated to take the World Health Organization's (WHO) report on the origins of the pandemic seriously, unlike many others in the intelligence community. Keen concluded that the origin of the virus came from an animal instead of a lab.  

Keen had had worked at the WHO previously, and after leavening the State Department, became the director for Global Health Security for the National Intelligence Council. She was also given a "central role in organizing the report” that Biden would see on the virus' origins.  

Keen was "very involved in discrediting the information that we were trying to present to the Secretary of State," according to Former Acting Assistant Secretary of State Thomas DiNanno, who served in the first Trump term, who previously spoke on the matter to reporters. 

The WSJ reported, "FBI experts argued that a thesis by Yu Ping, a young scientist at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, indicated that the type of coronavirus that was responsible for the pandemic was indigenous to the mountainous Yunnan province in western China and wasn’t found in Hubei province where the city of Wuhan is located. If Covid-19 had spread naturally from a bat to a host animal and then a human, as proponents of the zoonotic theory argued, early cases should have also been detected in the vast area between Yunnan and Wuhan, a distance of more than 1,500 kilometers. That region, which has a population of hundreds of millions of people, contains thousands of live animal markets." 

However, Keen argued that geographic origin could not be known and reasoned that China did not have enough surveillance to track outbreaks in more rural areas.  

In addition to these instances of Biden administration officials thwarting information related to the lab leak theory, three scientists from the National Center for Medical Intelligence, John Hardham, Robert Cutlip and Jean-Paul Chretien, concluded that the virus was manipulated in a lab. The three scientists also concluded that "a segment of the 'spike protein' that enables the virus to gain entry into human cells was constructed using techniques developed in the Wuhan lab that were described in a 2008 Chinese scientific paper," the WSJ reported.  

They also argued that their findings were in line with the theory that the scientists in China were conducing "gain of function" research. They were able to brief colleagues on the findings, including an FBI agent that worked with Bannan. However, in July 2021, they were told to stop working with the FBI, the only agency that determined that the virus came from a lab. They were told by superiors that the FBI was "off the reservation.”

In addition to this, many of their edits were not accepted by the National Intelligence Council for the report.