Whistleblower Allegations on COVID Origins

Intelligence dangerously compromised warned CIA and FBI whistleblowers

You're not the only one to report this of course,

but I was reading your report on it this morning

This is something that you have been warning about for quite some time

and the allegations Stem from a whistleblower who has come forward

to the house a whistleblower from the Central Intelligence Agency

I have the letter the relevant letter here

from the House Oversight Committee the whistleblower alleges that a CIA team

Was paid to change its assessment of the origins of kovat 19

Do I have that broadly correct set your understanding of the of the report?

This is obviously a bombshell report Deeply deeply troubling.

I'm glad that the house is going to look into it

We should look into it what caught my attention is you point out in your article on this?

That the government has deliberately violated the kovat origins act

Which this body passed unanimously which the house passed the president signed into law

I maybe wasn't so happy about signing it into law

But he did it is the law of the land and

which required that all of the government's intelligence on the origins of kovat be made public

Instead what the administration did was offer up a summary which they then in turn heavily

Redacted and you point out that in addition the government refused

to the administration refused to report the names of scientists who fell ill at the Wuhan institution of Institute of virology in 2019

despite the fact they know the names the intelligence community knows the names now

You're absolutely right to say this is a violation of the kovat origins act and I would know because I wrote it

So I'm not very happy about the fact that this administration continues to flaunt flout completely ignore

Public law passed again Unanimously by the United States Senate for

what end I can't tell I can't figure out why in the world I don't know what partisan game there is to it.

Why in the world? They want to lie to the American people you conclude your article

by saying the government has become extremely Comfortable with lying to us. Just explain what you mean by that and tell us why you think this is so significant

well, sure and just on the very specific point if we were the first to identify the the three people that

Contracted the coronavirus in China. They were the people working on gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology

The Wall Street Journal confirmed our reporting two weeks later

and then I think it was one week after that or a few days after that the ODNI report came out and it

Did not reveal this information and we had multiple sources the Wall Street Journal We have no idea if the Wall Street Journal sources were the same But

I think we're clearly seeing a lot of abuses of power occurring in multiple executive

Agencies, so we've seen it with the FBI One of the things that we noted yesterday was that we saw perverse incentives in the FBI

to go after so-called domestic violent extremism pulling an agent off of things

like child exploitation on to really hyping a set of cases that that particularly appeared to be aimed

at spreading disinformation around the idea that there is a significant increase of Domestic extremism when we don't think that the evidence shows that

And now we see this report that came out that suggests that there's an FBI whistleblower

who says that six of the seven analysts had said it was a laboratory origin and that they had reversed their position in

Some exchange for some sort of a salary bonus or some sort of financial incentive

So and we've been done, you know, it's a we keep documenting it.

We just keep finding agencies and agencies DHS

involved in trying to create a disinformation

Governance board I keep you know, the censorship industrial complex.

We just keep finding new parts of it So in the research for this testimony, we discovered this deep trust Alliance

I had you know What appears to be ties to the security and intelligence agencies of the United States government

appears to be trying to set itself up Although it's now kind of ghosted after 2021,

but if you're trying to set up self up to decide what is

Reality and what are fakes for people and I think it should have a chilling effect in that We that's not how we do free speech in America.

We don't have government agencies. We don't have

Cutouts or front groups that appear to have support from those agencies telling the American people what's true?

It's false or telling social media companies behind the scenes what they should be censoring and just to that last point

We now know thanks to the case, Missouri versus Biden that that's exactly what this administration from the White House to the FBI to the State Department to the CDC to SISA

Have all been meeting with the social media companies for years now

Giving them direct commands about what to censor and take down naming specific accounts and specific speech.

They want suppressed threatening the social media platforms if they don't do it and

remarkably I'm quoting the court here

the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals

and there's a huge evidentiary record

everybody go Don't take my word for it.

Go read the record It's all on the record

from the district court what the Fifth Circuit said

is remarkably the social media platforms all complied

all of them

They all agreed to be tools of the United States government

and to censor what they were ordered to censor

to suppress the speech They were ordered to suppress

You're a journalist tell us about the threat to the First Amendment

and by the way, just for the record

I think it's important to establish the Federal Court of Appeals said directly in no uncertain terms.

This was a clear Violation of the United States Constitution The First Amendment

does not allow the federal government to use private companies to censor

What they wouldn't be able to do it themselves and that's exactly what this administration has done

Tell us as a journalist the threat to free speech to freedom of the press

from this kind of collusion Between a very powerful government trying to hijack every media company.

You can get its hands on Sure,

I mean if you just start on the issue of the the kovat vaccine for example

public interest advocates spent a very long time

Trying to get the pharmacy requiring the pharmaceutical companies to list the side effects of their drugs in their advertisements

here We saw a situation where people were sharing information about the side effects of the vaccine

on Facebook and other social media platforms and the White House demanding that it be taken down

Facebook complying Acknowledging that it was often true information

We also saw that Facebook's own internal research showed that actually it increases vaccine hesitancy

when you censor Those stories that people are if they want to be comfortable with a new drug

They need to be able to talk it out of it.

So Facebook told the White House that actually would backfire the White House insisted

Facebook caved in because according to the Facebook executive Nick Clegg

He said well We've got this other business that we need to do with the White House

Which is the data flows meaning we need to we need the White House to help us negotiate with the Europeans To bring our data back to the United States So

I think the Fifth Circuit Court did a great job in identifying the clearly coercive measures

But I don't think it went far enough to because the First Amendment it prevents the government from abridging or infringing on free speech

Offering an incentive to social media platforms such as helping them with their dispute with Europe in exchange for censoring Often true content though.

Of course, the First Amendment also protects false content.

I Think it's a very chilling effect.

I think it's very disturbing anybody that cares about

holding powerful entities to account should be disturbed by what we saw take place on Facebook on Twitter and

You know I think that I think we just have to remind ourselves and what disturbs me

when I hear sort of the conversation on AI Coming into it sort of with the beginner mind.

I hear a lot of talk about how to protect the public from harm

We have to protect the public from harm.

What people are saying is that we need to censor speech

Censor certain voices censor disfavored voices because of this idea that it will cause real-world harm

This is a well-documented phenomenon that psychologists have measured where over decades people have just grossly expanded their definition of things that cause harm

and I think that we need to kind of This should be a moment for a reset that

Free speech is almost absolute in the United States with a few exceptions

around immediate incitement to violence around fraud around child exploitation

But we allow very Open conversation in the United States is what makes us so special.

So it's been a chilling effect as a journalist I've personally been censored by Facebook.

I think the platforms are out of control

Thank You, Mr. Sonnenberg. Thank you, Mr. Chairman