New FBI FOIA Emails Provide Evidence of Intelligence Community Covid Origin Cover Up

By Hans Mahncke & Jeff Carlson

An explosive new batch of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) emails reveals that the FBI knew early in 2020 that the Covid-19 pandemic likely originated in a Chinese lab. The key statement in the FBI emails, whose authors and recipients are all redacted, is that a lab made virus “***would leave no signature of purposeful human manipulation***” (emphasis original).

This disclosure is crucial because it contradicts the public narrative that was promoted by Anthony Fauci at the time. On February 1, 2020, Fauci commissioned the fraudulent Proximal Origin paper from a group of conflicted scientists who relied on funding from Fauci. The purpose of the paper was to create a false scientific foundation to discredit the lab leak theory. The fraudulent Proximal Origin paper, which became the media's go-to source for dismissing the lab leak theory, falsely proclaimed, "Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus." 

The fact that the FBI knew the entire foundation of the Proximal Origin's logic was fraudulent is highly significant. Not only did the FBI know that a lab leak was entirely possible, but they also knew that Fauci and a group of Fauci's confederates, represented by the Proximal Origin authors, were involved in a cover-up. 

On April 17, 2020, a day after President Donald Trump announced that he had seen evidence that the pandemic started at a Wuhan lab, Anthony Fauci stepped onto the White House podium to publicly rebuke Trump. With Trump standing right next to him, Fauci proclaimed to the world that the Proximal Origin paper had proven that Covid-19 was a natural virus. We now know that the FBI knew this to be a false narrative. Not only did Fauci fail to disclose that he himself was behind the paper, but he also pretended not to know who the authors were. It was a stunning act of deception, even by Fauci's standards.

The date of the new FBI emails, which were uncovered this week by the transparency group Judicial Watch, is also notable. The entire email thread, comprising four pages, documents the back-and-forth communication between unnamed FBI personnel on a single day, April 23, 2020. This was less than a week after Fauci publicly rebuked Trump, which raises the question of why no one within the FBI stepped forward to exonerate Trump and expose Fauci's treachery.

The key email, which states that a lab-made virus would not be identifiable as such, is followed by another email from an unnamed FBI agent, stating, "We just interviewed our person from [redacted] again and he provided us with some alarming new info. Give me call [sic] if you can." It is not known what is hidden behind the redaction, but it appears to be a four or five-letter word, perhaps Wuhan or China. Notwithstanding that we don't know the source's location, it seems from the context of the conversation among FBI agents that the source corroborated what had been outlined in the previous email in the thread, namely, that the Covid virus originated from a lab without leaving any identifiable signatures.

The new email thread fits neatly into a sequence of events involving the FBI. It has not been widely reported that, in early 2020, the FBI created a task force to investigate the origin of Covid. We only learned about the task force because one of the people consulted by the FBI, Professor Richard Ebright of Rutgers University, disclosed its existence in a tweet on January 24, 2024: “I can confirm that the FBI appointed a task force on COVID origins on or before April 6, 2020, the task force obtained proposals and progress reports for NIH grant AI110964 to EcoHealth (the grant that likely funded construction of SARS2), and EcoHealth was the subject or target.” EcoHealth is the shady organization led by Peter Daszak through which Fauci outsourced banned gain-of-function experiments to the WIV.

Ebright also confirmed the name of one of the agents involved in the FBI's task force: David A. Miller. Notably, Judicial Watch’s FOIA request, which led to the new revelations, was for “emails and text messages of the Newark Field Office, including to Special Agent David A. Miller, containing the terms “gain of function,” “GoF,” “R01A|110964,” and/or “EcoHealth.””

In a subsequent tweet, Ebright also disclosed that the FBI's task force was disbanded "almost immediately after it obtained NIH grant proposals and progress reports that pointed to direct involvement of NIH (Fauci) and EcoHealth (Daszak) in funding the research that constructed SARS-CoV-2”. According to Ebright, the FBI “was told to stand down in May 2020”.

The new email revelations provide important information about the timeline and likely circumstances that led to the disbandment of the FBI's Covid origin task force. We know that the fraudulent Proximal Origin paper was published on March 17. After the fraudulent paper was published, its authors were paraded around Washington D.C. to promote the false narrative of natural origin, likely at Fauci's request. However, the FBI does not seem to have been impressed with these deception efforts, at least not initially. They took a different course and spoke to Ebright on April 6. Ebright had famously warned in 2015 that Shi Zhengli, the director of the WIV, and her US collaborator, Ralph Baric, the godfather of gain-of-function experiments, were going to cause a man-made pandemic with their reckless experiments. Ebright had also explained in detail, as early as February 6, 2020, that the pandemic likely originated at the WIV due to the lab’s completely inadequate safety procedures. On April 6, Ebright was interviewed by the FBI. Trump then made his comments about the lab leak, only to be rebuked by Fauci. A few days later, around April 23, the FBI discovered that, despite Proximal Origin's claims, it was scientifically impossible to rule out a lab leak. That’s when the FBI knew that Proximal Origin was a fraudulent paper. The FBI also had a human source, presumably in Wuhan, who corroborated the lab leak theory. Then, on April 30, exactly one week after the newly released FBI emails were sent, the intelligence community declared that Covid had a natural origin. Inexplicably, that false declaration was released by the acting Director of National Intelligence (DNI), Richard Grenell, who was supposed to have been on Trump's side, not working against him. Grenell's successor, John Ratcliffe, also failed to tell the truth, at least while he was DNI. Years later, he had the courage to step forward and finally tell the truth that Covid originated from the WIV.

The main issue raised by the new emails is how it is possible that immediately after the FBI task force investigating the origin of Covid uncovered strong evidence of a lab leak, both in the form of Fauci's cover-up and in the form of a human source, the task force was shut down. The answer seems to lie in the fact that both Fauci and the intelligence community strongly opposed the lab leak theory. In Fauci’s case it was to protect himself. In the case of the intelligence community, the reasons for the cover-up are far from clear. But how and why did Fauci and the intelligence community have so much influence over the FBI? We do not know the answer. However, the fact that Grenell and Ratcliffe, two nominally credible individuals, were cowed into submission suggests that there were, and are, forces at work that we have very little understanding of. It took the FBI many years to recover from having its investigation shut down to the point where they are now willing to admit that Covid likely originated from the Wuhan lab.

History would have taken a very different turn, especially in the 2020 presidential election, if the FBI had publicly announced in April 2020 what they knew: that Covid originated from the WIV and that the Proximal Origin paper was fraudulent. Instead, they were browbeaten, blackmailed, or threatened into submission.