According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has found evidence that a Chinese lab leak caused the coronavirus disease, but the FBI has not compared the findings of other intelligence agencies to Joe Biden. He claimed he was not authorized to present it to President Biden. Jason Bannan, a Ph.D. in microbiology and a former senior research fellow at the FBI, argues that the FBI had “some confidence” in that assessment than other domestic intelligence and security agencies.
“The FBI will be asked to attend the briefing because it is the only government agency that has assessed a likely laboratory origin and is the one that has expressed the highest level of confidence in the analysis of the origins of the pandemic. “We expected it,” he said. Banan.
“I think it’s surprising that the White House didn’t ask.”
Notably, President Biden asked U.S. intelligence agencies and national laboratories in May 2021 whether the virus jumped from animals to humans or whether a Chinese lab leak was responsible for the spread of the pandemic. He had ordered an investigation into the matter.
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The National Intelligence Council (NIC), a group of senior intelligence officers, organized an investigation and concluded there was “low confidence” that the coronavirus was transmitted from animals to humans. The findings were then presented to President Biden and his aides in August 2021 by Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Avril Haines and two senior analysts. The CIA and three other agencies agreed with the findings.
“What ends up on the cutting room floor needs to be reconsidered,” Bannan said, criticizing the lack of transparency in the intelligence community’s findings.
Asked why the FBI’s views were not heard, a spokesperson for the DNI office said, “It is not standard practice to invite representatives from each agency to the president’s press conference, and differing opinions within the intelligence community are fair.” was represented by.”
“The work of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the National Intelligence Council on the origins of the novel coronavirus adhered to all standards of intelligence community analysis, including objectivity,” the spokesperson said.
The Republican-led Commission on COVID-19 also released a report earlier this month arguing that the virus “likely emerged as a result of a laboratory or research-related accident.”
