Biden missed deadline for declassifying intelligence on Wuhan lab and origins of COVID-19
by Jerry Dunleavy, Justice Department Reporter | Washington Examiner
June 20, 2023 09:24 AM
President Joe Biden missed a key deadline set by a bipartisan law he signed that called for the declassification and release of intelligence on the Wuhan lab and its possible links to the origins of COVID-19.
The House and Senate unanimously passed the COVID-19 Origin Act of 2023 in March, with the law giving the Office of the Director of National Intelligence 90 days to declassify and release intelligence on the Wuhan Institute of Virology and its connections to the emergence of SARS-CoV-2. The deadline passed on Sunday without the declassification happening.
Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI), the chairman of the select committee on China who sponsored the bill in the House, told the Washington Examiner that "Congress overwhelmingly passed legislation requiring the administration to declassify all relevant intelligence around the origins of COVID-19." The congressman said, "Biden cannot continue to ignore this overwhelming bipartisan consensus" and that "Congress must use every tool at its disposal to enforce this law and ensure the president makes this information available to the public."
The law instructed Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines to “declassify any and all information relating to potential links between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the origin” of COVID-19, including intelligence on the “activities performed by the Wuhan Institute of Virology with or on behalf of the People's Liberation Army” and “coronavirus research or other related activities performed at the Wuhan Institute of Virology prior to the outbreak” of SARS-CoV-2.
The legislation also told the Biden administration to hand over any information on the “researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology who fell ill in autumn 2019.”
Biden said on March 20 that he was “pleased” to sign the measure into law, contending that “I share the Congress’s goal of releasing as much information as possible about the origin” of COVID-19.
The president said in his signing statement that his administration “will continue to review all classified information relating to COVID–19’s origins, including potential links to the Wuhan Institute of Virology” and that his team “will declassify and share as much of that information as possible, consistent with my constitutional authority to protect against the disclosure of information that would harm national security.”
The bipartisan measure allowed for “only such redactions as the Director determines necessary to protect sources and methods.”
Sens. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Mike Braun (R-IN), who led the way in passing the bill in the Senate, sent a letter to Biden last week “to urge the swift and complete implementation” of the law.
“That deadline, June 18, 2023, is fast approaching,” Hawley and Braun wrote. “Your Administration has not yet provided any indication of when the relevant material will be declassified.”
The senators told Biden the law “does not allow for redactions based on your Administration’s view of ‘national security’ broadly defined, as you claimed in your signing statement” but “rather, the Act only provides for much narrower redactions to protect intelligence sources and methods.”
Braun and Hawley told Biden his administration “should comply with the law as written and not undermine clear congressional intent to provide as much transparency to the American people as possible.”
The GOP senators added, “The American people deserve to know how this pandemic began, and their democratically elected representatives have expressed their will unanimously” and said that “we urge you not to stand in their way.”
Gallagher said last week, “The Biden administration should stop dragging its feet and immediately declassify all the relevant intelligence surrounding COVID-19, as they are legally required to do by June 18” and that “the clock is ticking.”
The Wuhan Institute of Virology has long been suspected as the source of the COVID-19 global pandemic that contributed to the deaths of more than 1 million Americans. The close relationship between the Wuhan lab and the Chinese military has been a focal point for congressional investigators.
FBI Director Christopher Wray confirmed earlier this year the bureau has long believed with “moderate confidence” that COVID-19 originated at a Chinese government lab, and it was revealed the Energy Department now believes with “low confidence” that the coronavirus started at a Wuhan lab.
Haines promised in March to share the Energy Department’s assessment with the House Intelligence Committee.
ODNI released an assessment in August 2021 stating that four U.S. spy agencies and the National Intelligence Council believed with "low confidence" that COVID-19 most likely had a natural origin.
ODNI's further declassified October 2021 report also included a section titled “The Case for the Laboratory-Associated Incident Hypothesis,” apparently a summary of the FBI’s argument.
The intelligence office did not respond to the Washington Examiner’s request for comment on its declassification delay.
Former DNI John Ratcliffe, who has long insisted that the intelligence is strong that COVID-19 originated at a Wuhan lab, called it “utter nonsense” in March to claim that the CIA doesn’t have enough information to reach a conclusion on natural origin versus lab leak.
EcoHealth Alliance’s Peter Daszak was a longtime collaborator with the Wuhan lab and its “bat lady” leader Shi Zhengli. Daszak steered hundreds of thousands of dollars in National Institutes of Health bat coronavirus funding to the Chinese institute.
The State Department made it clear that getting to the bottom of COVID-19’s origins was not a key reason for Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s visit to China this week.
A State Department spokesperson told the Washington Examiner that the State Department readout of Blinken’s visit to China, as well as his Monday press conference in Beijing, “presents the key purpose or reasons for the visit.” COVID-19’s origins went completely unmentioned in both.
Blinken’s only mentions of coronavirus came in relation to the pandemic’s effect on the economy and the Biden administration’s desire for China to do well.
“China’s broad economic success is also in our interest. We have done a remarkable job rebounding from COVID and having a growing economy — very low unemployment, tremendous investments in our future,” Blinken said in Beijing. “But we also benefit tremendously when there is growth and progress in other countries — especially of one of the world’s largest economies, when it comes to China."
The secretary of state later echoed that “at a time when countries are trying to rebound from COVID, something the United States has done very successfully, we want to see growth, we want to see success, in every part of the world, including, of course, in the major economies like China.”
The White House did not respond to a request for comment
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