Former CIA director Gina Haspel, FBI director Kash Patel charges, “authorized six case officers and intelligence analysts to be paid off so that they would change their assessment on COVID originations.”

According to Patel, this was “a CIA institutional decision to spend taxpayer dollars to lie to the world where COVID came from because it fit the narrative that Fauci and the media wanted out there, along with Gina Haspel, because she didn’t want Donald Trump to get the credit for reading the intel right and making the hard right decision.” As it turns out, Patel and Haspel have a history of sorts.

In December 2020, President Trump proposed to install Patel as Haspel’s deputy. Haspel huffed that she would resign rather than allow Patel to replace her deputy, Vaughn Bishop, whose job was “to preach the need for and value of social science methodologies in the art of analysis.” Patel was not installed and Haspel remained at the helm until 2021. Stories began to circulate about Fauci making a covert visit to the agency.

In 2023, Rep. Brad Westrup, chairman of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, wanted to know whether Fauci succeeded in gaining CIA support for his contention that the pandemic arose naturally in the wild, what he calls “proximal origin.” This view, we now know, was largely a matter of speculation, not science. Sen. Rand Paul, a medical doctor who called for a criminal investigation of Fauci, outlined the possibilities.

Sen. Paul said Fauci may have “convinced the CIA to dishonestly obscure the lab origin of COVID.” It is also possible that “the CIA convinced Fauci to obscure the lab origin of COVID,” he said. As Paul saw it, “an outside entity or person with unlimited monetary resources convinced Fauci to influence the CIA to obscure the lab origin of COVID.”

At the time, even the FBI subscribed to the laboratory origin thesis, as did Dr. Kristian Andersen of Scripps Research. Fauci, however, pressured Anderson into changing his view to the proximal origin theory, according to congressional testimony. When former CDC director Robert Redfield found evidence of a laboratory origin, he got death threats.

In 2021, Joe Biden ordered the intelligence community to investigate the origins of COVID, but the results were inconclusive. “Critical information about the origins of this pandemic exists in the People’s Republic of China,” Biden said in a statement. “Government officials in China have worked to prevent international investigators and members of the global public health community from accessing it.”

According to the late Angelo Codevilla, an expert on the CIA like no other, U.S. intelligence had few assets in China, human or technical, capable of rendering information on the Wuhan lab. On the other hand, the CDC’s own  “medical CIA,” the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS), is well suited for the task. In early 2020, EIS veteran Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases (NCIRD), delivered a series of press briefings that raised troubling questions.

The CDC “has a team that’s been in China for many years where we work closely with the Department of Health in China,” Messonnier said. “I think we should be clear to compliment the Chinese on the early recognition of the respiratory outbreak center in the Wuhan market, and how rapidly they were able to identify it as a novel coronavirus.” When asked about travel from Wuhan, Messonnier said that was “not something that I’m at liberty to talk about today.” The CDC mouthpiece did not reveal who, exactly, was laying down the rules.

In May 2021, Messonnier suddenly resigned, and CDC boss Rochelle Walensky promptly proclaimed her a “true hero.” Messonnier decamped for the Skoll Foundation and now serves as dean for the Gillings School of Global Public Health at the University of North Carolina. The “true hero” has yet to testify before Congress on her pandemic performance or the role of the EIS.

Some details about that agency emerged at a conference Messonnier attended in 2013. However, the link to the proceedings of that conference has been removed from the internet. 

The 2013 conference revealed that 12 of the then newly appointed EIS officers were citizens of other nations, including Cambodia, Mongolia, Nigeria, and China. Americans have a right to wonder which nation’s interests the Chinese EIS officers served, and if any were on the CDC “team” working with China for years leading up to COVID. And how did the “novel coronavirus” from the “Wuhan market,” escape the intrepid “disease detectives” of the EIS? Was anybody disciplined, demoted, or dismissed? 

As it happens, Messonnier is the sister of Rod Rosenstein, a key figure in the Russia probe targeting candidate and later President Donald Trump. Did brother Rosenstein or someone else in the Justice Department tell Messonnier she was “not at liberty” to discuss travel from Wuhan? In a similar vein, the public has a right to know whether CIA director Haspel paid off CIA officers to parrot Fauci’s view on COVID’s origins. The six officers cited by Patel could clear that up in sworn testimony, and Haspel could address other matters of importance.

Haspel joined the CIA in 1985 and, as she rose through the ranks, requested a transfer to the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center. Her first day on the job was Sept. 11, 2001, the date of the massive attack the CIA failed to prevent. Haspel’s colleague John Brennan believed that jihad is “a holy struggle in pursuit of a moral goal” and “not necessarily synonymous” with violence. Is that Haspel’s belief?  Was that the position of the CIA on her watch as a station chief, deputy director of the National Clandestine Service, and CIA director?

Former CIA director John Brennan, a big fan of Haspel, wrote Undaunted: My Fight Against America’s Enemies, at Home and Abroad. Does Haspel believe that the CIA has enemies “at home”? Former CIA man John Gentry wrote Neutering the CIA: Why US Intelligence Versus Trump Has Long-Term Consequences. What does Gina Haspel, now advising a law firm,  know about CIA operations against Trump? Was the Hunter Biden laptop a project of “Russian disinformation” as Brennan and 50 other intel bosses contended?

John Brennan has been referred to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution. Joe Biden pardoned Fauci, but not Messonnier or Haspel. Congress should now shine a light on both of them. The people deserve the full truth, and justice is long overdue.