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 COVID-19.

Do I have that broadly correct, is that your understanding 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 COVID Origins Act,

which this body passed unanimously,

which the House passed, the President signed into law.

Maybe he 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 COVID 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 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 COVID 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.

Sure, and just on a very specific point,

we were the first to identify 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,

onto really hyping a set of cases 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, you know, so 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 that has,

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 appeared to try to set itself up to decide what is reality and what are fakes for

people. And I think it should have a chilling effect in that 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, what'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 CISA,

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, and I'm quoting the court here,

the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, and there's a huge evidentiary record.

Everybody can 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 when 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 it can get its hands on.

Well, sure. I mean, if you just start on the issue of the COVID vaccine,

for example, public interest advocates spent a very long time trying to get the pharmaceutical,

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, if they want to be comfortable with a new drug, they need to be able to talk it out a bit.

So Facebook told the White House that actually it 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 around 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.

It's 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.