Pompeo Slams Biden’s Shut-Down of Lab-Leak Probe: ‘They Haven’t Lifted a Finger’ By Jimmy Quinn
EXCLUSIVE: The former secretary of state fires back amid reports that the Biden State Department cut short a coronavirus-origin investigation he once led.
F ormer secretary of state Mike Pompeo blasted the Biden administration’s efforts to date to get to the bottom of the coronavirus pandemic’s origins, amid reports that the current State Department had ended an inquiry from his watch concerning the possibility of the so-called lab-leak theory.
“They haven’t lifted a finger, as I understand it,” he told National Review in an interview on Wednesday, regarding the U.S. government’s efforts to investigate the COVID-19 pandemic’s origin. “They haven’t even raised it with Xi Jinping, and I don’t know that it was raised when National-Security Adviser Sullivan and Secretary Blinken were in Anchorage. I don’t know that they laid down their demands, nor do I know if they told them in the case that you don’t comply with these demands, here are the costs we’re going to impose on you.”
The former secretary of state’s comments came amid an extraordinary about-face concerning the lab-leak theory of COVID’s origins by major media outlets, Democratic officials, and others who previously had dismissed it. This culminated in an announcement by President Biden on Wednesday afternoon calling for the intelligence community to further investigate and report back within 90 days, noting that community has “‘coalesced around two likely scenarios’ but has not reached a definitive conclusion on this question.” This followed acknowledgement of the plausibility of the lab theory in recent days by Dr. Anthony Fauci, Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, and a number of other key officials.
The Biden administration has never denied the findings of a January 15 fact sheet issued by the Trump administration claiming that researchers at a Wuhan lab came down with respiratory illnesses in 2019 and that the facility hosted military research. Officials have, however, kept a cool distance from these revelations, and some even alleged that the Trump administration had, in issuing the fact sheet, “put spin on the ball.”
With support for investigating the plausibility of a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology now growing, Pompeo suggested it was strange that others had not joined him in raising this possibility in the past. Specifically, he said that top Democratic officials likely had access to the intelligence on which he based his May 2020 claim that a lab-leak origin was supported by “enormous evidence.”
“I wasn’t the only one who saw that evidence. There would have been people in both political parties who would have seen the same intelligence that I had seen and the same data set that I was depending on,” he said.
His comments followed new reports that painted the State Department’s work under his tenure as motivated by an effort to boost an anti-China political narrative to distract from the Trump administration’s handling of the pandemic. CNN reported that the Biden administration had shut down a Pompeo-era State Department investigation focused on COVID’s origins and the lab theory that began in late 2020, over concerns about the “legitimacy of the findings” and “an ineffective use of resources.”
But the CNN piece, Pompeo said, had asserted the inverse of what actually took place with the department’s efforts to uncover more information about the pandemic’s origins. He said the investigation had not been started to cover for his claims last year that the virus could have leaked from a lab — and in fact, that a broader inquiry into the disease’s origins had begun in January 2020 in an effort to prevent the loss of American lives.
“The work that had been done provided the basis for me in May 2020 to speak about the fact that the lab-leak theory had what I said at the time was ‘enormous evidence.’”
CNN’s report said the Biden administration ended an inquiry into the lab-leak hypothesis after the team responsible for the effort briefed senior officials about their initial findings in February and March. State Department spokesman Ned Price told Fox News, however, that “there has been incorrect reporting that the Biden-Harris administration shut down an investigation by the State Department’s Bureau of Arms Control, Verification and Compliance (AVC) into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Technically speaking, the department shut down a more specific aspect of a broader, ongoing, statutorily required analysis of different countries’ compliance with bio-weapons treaties. The portion of the broader investigation that had looked at the nexus of the Chinese military’s bio-weapon programs and the WIV was the aspect of the inquiry that the department had reportedly ended.
He stood behind that part of the investigation, despite pushback against the AVC inquiry from within the department.
“There was a serious effort to try to figure out what the heck had happened and use the tools we had to understand if there was a bio-weapons component associated with WIV that was material and was relevant to the issue that was causing massive deaths in the United States and all around the world,” said Pompeo.
He also confirmed that the AVC investigation led to the data set that formed the basis of that key January 15 fact sheet about COVID’s origins. A former senior administration official also told National Review that without the AVC investigation, there would have been no fact sheet.
Former senior State Department officials told National Review that false claims about the AVC inquiry had originated from one former official, Chris Ford, who served in the Trump administration as assistant secretary of state for international security and nonproliferation, before quitting in the aftermath of the January 6 Capitol riot. These former officials claimed that Ford, who is quoted by CNN and Fox raising concerns about the AVC investigation, was upset about being sidelined by Pompeo and his team throughout the process. National Review reached Ford on Wednesday afternoon, but he declined to comment on the record. In his interview with Fox, Ford specifically raised concerns about a January 7 meeting in which the AVC brought the author of a paper assessing the statistical likelihood of a lab-leak incident in for a discussion with leading coronavirus experts. “One particular claim made by AVC purporting to ‘prove’ WIV origin through ‘statistical analysis’ turned out to be junk science and evaporated when subjected to scrutiny by their own scientific panel,” Ford said about the session.
But a former official familiar with the inquiry told National Review that vetting that particular analysis, a paper by Dr. Steven Quay purporting to demonstrate that COVID most likely originated from a laboratory, was the goal of the meeting, and that Quay, an expert in biostatistics, had walked away from the session with constructive suggestions about his paper. Another key participant in the meeting confirmed that it had not been called to advance any single conclusion, as Ford had claimed. It was supposed to be the first of several such discussions to exchange ideas on the topic while the Quay paper went through a peer-review process.
Moreover, the three technical experts who had supposedly debunked the analysis all signed on to an earthshaking letter in Science magazine this month calling for a closer look at the lab-leak theory. Ford, for his part, told Fox that he doesn’t oppose a closer look at the Wuhan lab and that he was just trying to prevent the reputational harm to Pompeo that could follow advocacy of a faulty analysis. Miles Yu, who served as senior adviser to Pompeo on China, addressed the implications of the apparent attempt to deflate the legitimacy of the AVC investigation in an interview with NR: “CNN is trying to politicize what the Trump administration is doing, which is a tragedy because the inquiry into the origin of COVID should be absolutely nonpartisan. The AVC team was a serious, nonbiased effort in the right direction. To have it shut down fuels partisan tenor of this worthwhile inquiry, which the Biden administration claimed to want done.”
Pompeo also addressed the mainstream-media consensus that had, until this month, characterized assertions that evidence of a lab leak was a conspiracy theory. “You realize that organizations like the New York Times, who have now as much as said we didn’t believe it because it came from the Trump administration, are truly fake news and are operating in a political space devoid of science.”
Pompeo also explained that the growing acceptance of the theory that he and others had championed for over a year, to widespread condemnation in the press and other quarters, has made it easier to “do everything that we can to prove the right answer” about the origins of the pandemic.
He added, “It’s not important so that I’m vindicated. It’s important because the next one will kill 30 million people. And that lab is still operating today.”
Comments are closed.
