Five Years Ago: How the Intelligence Community Sabotaged Trump on Covid’s Origin

Five years ago today, on April 30, 2020, the United States Intelligence Community (IC) released a statement that undercut the sitting President of the United States on one of the most consequential questions of the 21st century: where did Covid come from?

The now-infamous IC statement declared, “The Intelligence Community also concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not manmade or genetically modified.” That single line became the basis for years of media and political attacks on President Trump, who had just begun informing the public that the virus originated from a laboratory in Wuhan.

A 2023 tweet (screenshot below) by Ric Grenell—President Trump’s acting Director of National Intelligence at the time the IC statement was released—later confirmed that the IC’s 2020 message wasn’t the result of a neutral fact-finding exercise. It was a political statement that was negotiated, and it misrepresented what the IC knew at the time. In truth, it was a targeted effort to box in Trump, protect Fauci, and suppress the lab origin theory just as it began to gain traction.

The timing of the IC’s announcement was no coincidence. On April 15, 2020, President Trump publicly floated the lab origin theory for the first time. Reporters immediately tried to frame his remarks as conspiratorial, but Trump didn’t back down.