Newly confirmed CIA Director John Ratcliffe told Fox News on Sunday that the CIA’s decision to release a Biden-era assessment of the once widely dismissed COVID-19 lab leak is the real story. supported, is a step toward transparency with the American people.
Speaking in his first interview since being confirmed as the agency’s director last Thursday, Ratcliffe described the insights he shared shortly after taking office and reaffirmed the importance of restoring trust in American institutions. .
“I had the opportunity on my first day to make public an assessment that was actually made in the Biden administration, so it can’t be accused of being political, and that the CIA has estimated that the pandemic “The most likely cause is this worldwide devastation was caused by a lab-related incident in Wuhan, so we will continue to investigate that going forward,” said “Sunday Morning Futures” host Maria. Told to Barteromo.
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Rep. John Ratcliffe, R-TX, speaks to the press at the U.S. Capitol on January 27, 2020 in Washington, DC. (Getty Images)
“I think it was important for the American people to see an agency like the CIA go away and be true to what our intelligence shows and, at the same time, protect us from adversaries like China if they get into it. involved or contributed to it,” he added.
The CIA now appears to slightly favor the lab leak theory that suggests fine-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China may have directly contributed to the virus.
A CIA spokesperson told Fox News that the agency “estimates with low confidence that the source of the COVID-19 pandemic is more likely to be of natural origin based on the available body of source reporting related to the research. And COVID-19 Natural origin scenarios for epidemics are plausible.”
“We have little confidence in this decision and will continue to review any available reliable new intelligence reporting or open source information that may change the CIA’s assessment.”
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Security personnel stand guard outside the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan as a World Health Organization (WHO) team investigating the origins of the COVID-19 coronavirus arrives in Wuhan, central China’s Hubei province, on February 3. Visiting the institute located in 2021. (Hector Ratamel/AFP via Getty Images)
As the virus spread around the world in 2020, top health officials have widely argued that COVID-19 is a naturally occurring pathogen, despite many speculating otherwise. .
Releasing the CIA analysis is one way to support President Trump’s push to restore American confidence in intelligence agencies and law enforcement, Ratcliffe said.
“That includes the CIA,” Ratcliffe said.
“The purpose of the CIA is to protect Americans, to protect us from foreign threats and foreign enemies, but we also have to be honest with Americans, and they [President Trump] has emphasized to me and others that these are not mutually exclusive missions. We can do both.”
“In the case of the CIA, the best foreign intelligence service in the world, five years later, [they did not] To be honest with the American people, there is no public understanding of the possible source of this pandemic that has killed millions of people around the world, including one million Americans, and indeed has affected all 345 million Americans in some way. People lost their jobs. They lost the house. They lost their health, they lost their business, all of that…”
Fox News’ Rachel Wolff and Jennifer Griffin contributed to this report.
