Dr. Anthony Fauci was “escorted” into CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia “without a record of entry,” and “influenced” the agency’s review of the origins of COVID-19, Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) has claimed.
In a Sept. 26 press release, Mr. Wenstrup said the new alleged evidence obtained by the panel adds to further alleged evidence slowly mounting against Dr. Fauci, who served as the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and the head of former President Donald Trump’s COVID-19 response team.
This includes recent whistleblower testimony acquired by the panel alleging that the CIA “potentially skewed its COVID-19 origins review by offering six analysts significant financial incentives to conclude that the result of its investigation was inconclusive,” Mr. Wenstrup said.
It also includes recently uncovered evidence that Dr. Fauci “prompted” the drafting of a paper titled “The Proximal Origins of SARS-CoV-2,” which was published in Nature Medicine in March 2020 and was heavily cited by experts and officials as evidence that COVID-19 didn’t originate from a lab leak.
The paper, which has been accessed more than 5.8 million times and cited more than 2,800 times, stated that SARS-CoV-2 was “not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus” but likely evolved naturally.
This mounting evidence, Mr. Wenstrup said, “lends credence to heightened concerns about the promotion of a false COVID-19 origins narrative by multiple federal government agencies.”
“According to information gathered by the Select Subcommittee, Dr. Anthony Fauci, then-director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, played a role in the Central Intelligence Agency’s review of the origins of COVID-19,” the Ohio Republican said in the press release. “The information provided suggests that Dr. Fauci was escorted into Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Headquarters—without a record of entry—and participated in the analysis to ‘influence’ the Agency’s review.”
‘The American People Deserve the Truth’
“Our goal is to ensure the scientific investigative process regarding the origins of COVID-19 was fair, impartial, and free of alternative influence,” Mr. Wenstrup wrote.
The lawmaker shared a letter (pdf) sent to the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on Sept. 26, Christi Grimm, in which he detailed the latest “concerning information” allegedly obtained by his panel regarding Dr. Fauci.
“The Select Subcommittee’s goal is to ensure accountability and transparency. The American people deserve the truth—to know the origins of the virus and whether there was a concerted effort by public health authorities to suppress the lab leak theory for political or national security purposes,” he wrote.
“Accordingly, information regarding specific movements of Dr. Fauci throughout the pandemic is reasonable and hardly intrusive, especially considering he is no longer employed by the federal government, he is no longer a protectee of the Inspector General, and we are not requesting any information regarding his current movements,” Mr. Wenstrup said.
The letter does not detail exactly when Dr. Fauci allegedly visited the CIA headquarters and why the alleged visit was not documented in entry records.
However, the lawmaker asked the HHS inspector general to hand over an array of materials and comments to assist with the select subcommittee’s ongoing investigation, including documents and communications between employees at HHS, the CIA, NIAID and the U.S. Marshals Service, which was assigned to protect Dr. Fauci, regarding the “admittance or entry” of Dr. Fauci into “any CIA owned, operated, or occupied building, including but not limited to the George Bush Center of Intelligence.”
Mr. Wenstrup also asked HHS to hand over documents “sufficient to show any Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General authorized, supported, or otherwise affiliated movements of Dr. Anthony Fauci from January 1, 2020 through December 31.”
The requested documents should be handed over to the committee by no later than Oct. 10, according to Mr. Wenstrup.
Additionally, the lawmaker asked that HHS Special Agent Brett Rowland be made available for a “voluntary transcribed interview” at a date that is yet to be established.
“The Committees reserve their right to conduct follow-up interviews or request testimony from other witnesses pertinent to our investigation,” Mr. Wenstrup noted.
The Epoch Times has contacted Dr. Fauci and the CIA for comment.
Fauci, NIH Exerted ‘Undue Influence’ in Downplaying Lab Leak Theory
In July, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic published a report detailing how officials with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Dr. Fauci, and World Health Organization (WHO) Chief Scientist Jeremy Farrar, among other top scientists, exerted “undue influence” in downplaying the theory that COVID-19 was the result of a lab leak.
That report cited various emails and transcribed interviews and found that Dr. Fauci suggested the drafting of the now infamous “Proximal Origins of SARS-CoV-2” paper to officials and was involved in the day-to-day creation of the paper.
The goal of the paper, according to the subcommittee was to “disprove” the lab leak theory to avoid blaming China for the COVID-19 pandemic, and it employed “fatally flawed science to achieve its goal” and contains arguments with “inaccurate assumptions and obvious inconsistencies.”
Earlier this month, the subcommittee also shared deeply concerning testimony (pdf) from an unnamed senior-level CIA agent turned whistleblower who claimed that the intelligence agency bribed six analysts to reject the theory that COVID-19 was the result of a lab leak, most likely from a laboratory in Wuhan, China.
“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,” Mr. Wenstrup said in a letter to CIA Director William Burns.
“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,” the letter said.
At the time, the CIA said it was looking into the allegations and was “committed to the highest standards of analytic rigor, integrity, and objectivity.”
“We do not pay analysts to reach specific conclusions. We take these allegations extremely seriously and are looking into them. We will keep our congressional oversight committees appropriately informed,” the agency said.
According to a recently declassified report (pdf) from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Intelligence Community is divided on the most likely origin of COVID-19, although most agencies assess with “low confidence” that the virus “probably was not genetically engineered.”
From The Epoch Times