Top Intel Republican turns up heat on Biden to declassify COVID origins findings trends now

Top Intel Republican turns up heat on Biden to declassify COVID origins findings trends now
Top Intel Republican turns up heat on Biden to declassify COVID origins findings trends now

Top Intel Republican turns up heat on Biden to declassify COVID origins findings trends now

After the House and Senate voted unanimously to make public the intelligence related to Covid-19 origins, House Intelligence Committee chair Mike Turner said the Biden administration has no excuse not to allow full declassification to move forward.

'There will be no damage to any intelligence community sources or means and methods for the release of this Covid-19 material,' Turner insisted in an interview with DailyMail.com.

'Congress having passed this with strong bipartisan support gives the President the backing to be able to take the action to declassify this information.'

The declassification bill came after the Energy Department revealed with low confidence that Covid-19 most likely leaked from a lab and the FBI concluded the same with moderate confidence. 

President Biden has not indicated he would veto the law so it's expected to become law, requiring the Director of National Intelligence to declassify Covid-19 origin findings within 90 days and send an unclassified report back to Congress. 

The bill specifically asks for details on coronavirus and gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and information on the researchers who fell ill in fall 2019, before the virus was known to the world. 

House Intelligence Committee chair Mike Turner said the Biden administration has no excuse not to allow full declassification to move forward

House Intelligence Committee chair Mike Turner said the Biden administration has no excuse not to allow full declassification to move forward

Questions remain around whether Covid-19 originated in the Wuhan lab

Questions remain around whether Covid-19 originated in the Wuhan lab 

It instructs the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) to only redact information as necessary to protect sources and methods.

That could be interpreted loosely, though Turner says based on what he's seen in classified settings he doesn't believe it should be. 'It is possible that the administration will redact some information, but no information should be redacted.' 

'Redacting the information as to how you got it is different from redacting the information. There is nothing in this information that discloses the source,' Turner added. 

'The conclusions and the information that the intelligence community has should be out in the public domain.' 

'There's no need to protect China,' he added. 

Republicans have alleged that Dr. Anthony Fauci, longtime head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was working to fund the Wuhan lab and gain-of-function research and therefore had incentive to point the public toward natural origin. 

'Clearly statements made by Fauci have been proven to be false,' Turner said. 'Just last week he made statements that even if it was a lab leak, it was still from natural origins, which is completely not supported by any of the information that the Intelligence Committee has reviewed, and that would have been available to him.'

On Saturday Fauci suggested on CNN that if the virus was found in nature then studied in the lab and spilled out of the lab it would still be considered 'natural origin.' 

'A lab leak could be that someone was out in the wild, maybe looking for different types of viruses in bats, got infected, went into a lab, and was being studied in a lab, and then came out of the lab. But if that's the definition of lab leak, then that's still a natural occurrence,' Fauci said. 

'I can't understand why he keeps making these statements,' Turner said. 

'This is why it's important for this information to become public so we're not dealing with competing statements from people who've seen the intelligence. The American people are smart - they need to be able to read the intelligence themselves.'

Ex-CDC Director Robert Redfield said in a Covid origins hearing last week: 'I don't think that answers are going to come from the scientific community. I think it's going come from the intelligence

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