Very Interesting Part of the Article…
Pompeo-led effort to hunt down Covid lab theory shut down by Biden administration over concerns about quality of evidence
Kylie Atwood
By Kylie Atwood, CNN
Updated 7:53 PM ET, Tue May 25, 2021
https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/25/politics/biden-shut-down-trump-effort-coronavirus-chinese-lab/index.html
'Suspicious as hell'
Opponents of the State Department inquiry viewed the effort as alarming because those working on it appeared to actively hide their work from skeptics, two sources said.
"The way they did their work was suspicious as hell," said one former State Department official who was familiar with the effort. "They basically conducted it in secret, cutting out the State Department's technical experts and the Intelligence Community, and then trying to brief certain senior officials in the interagency on their 'tentative conclusions' even before they'd let the department leaders they worked for know an investigation was underway at all."
During the final weeks of the Trump administration, when senior officials in the department who had been shielded from the efforts learned about how far the inquiry had gone, they pushed for a panel of outside scientists to review the findings. When scientists looked at the data, during a 3-hour long meeting in early January, the evidence collected up until that point appeared inconclusive and misguided, two sources said.
"It smelled like they were just fishing to justify pre-determined conclusions and cut out experts who could critique their 'science,' " said the former official familiar with the effort. "The reason for all this became clear when real scientists finally got a chance to see their analysis, and [the inquiry's] 'statistical' case fell apart."
The briefing prompted then-Assistant Secretary Chris Ford to send a memo to a handful of department officials, including top leadership, urging caution about the group's findings.
Ford called aspects of the analysis "gravely flawed" and urged officials "against suggesting that there is anything inherently suspicious and suggestive of biological warfare activity about People's Liberation Army involvement at WIV on classified projects."
'Dissenting perspectives on purpose'
But those involved in the project who said they relied on the intelligence community throughout their inquiry defended their efforts.
"Our scientific consulting process involved dissenting perspectives on purpose," said one source involved in the project. "It was a meeting with deliberative disagreement."
"There was a total misunderstanding of the entire process. We used experts and one specific team of experts but there was no consensus in the IC," said a second former official working on the effort. "The IC was saying this is a public health issue and this has nothing to do with biological weapons. Well, we said, how do we know that?"
Pompeo put out a statement as the Trump administration was leaving office that said the US had determined collaboration between the Wuhan lab where Covid-19 research has been conducted on bats, and secret Chinese military projects. The process behind declassifying the intelligence in that statement took weeks, and certain details were scrubbed from the final version which was put out, sources familiar with the process told CNN. The State Department's small group looking into the lab leak theory contributed to that fact sheet, but most of its information came from the US intelligence community, sources told CNN.
When the Biden administration took office, it did not see any significant doubts in the datapoints featured in the fact sheet Pompeo put out, according to one source familiar. The information was vetted by the intelligence community but it was also a select few datapoints from a mountain of data in what the Biden administration viewed as a deliberate effort to put more weight into the lab leak theory while they ignored information suggesting the virus spread naturally from animals to humans.