Senior American intelligence officials concealed classified intelligence that COVID-19 came from a lab from the president and the public, granting Anthony Fauci’s inner circle extraordinary influence while silencing their own spy scientists, a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation found.
Evidence pointing to a lab leak included signals intelligence collected from Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leaders in 2019 between Beijing and Wuhan revealing a major emergency, one former official told the DCNF. An increasingly political deep state concealed it from President Donald Trump during the first two months of the pandemic, deflecting blame from China as political rival Joe Biden sought to lay responsibility for the pandemic squarely at Trump’s feet. (RELATED: Doc Who Revived Zombie Virus From Frozen Corpse Now Has Keys To Fauci’s Old Agency)
Higher-ups continued to dismiss evidence for a lab leak as the fodder for a conspiracy theory and Trump’s hardline stance against China, deceiving millions of Americans about a disease that upended their lives and felled loved ones. Spy scientists at four intelligence agencies and four other government officials spoke to the DCNF on condition of anonymity to reveal previously unreported details about censored intelligence under two presidential administrations.
Spy scientists also decoded engineering in the COVID-19 genome — clues Chinese authorities were powerless to hide, two spy scientists said. But this evidence was conspicuously omitted from public reports released by the intelligence community under then-President Biden, as senior officials instead elevated the analyses of Fauci’s inner circle, who argued the virus was assuredly natural. The omission prompted a formal complaint from one agency, one spy scientist said.
Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard told the DCNF she would hold the intelligence community accountable by working with whistleblowers, reviewing classified material, and investigating where taxpayer funds may have helped create the COVID-19 virus.
“It is clear that dissenting views were likely silenced to support the Biden Administration’s preferred narrative. Under President Trump’s maximum transparency agenda, we’re committed to exposing the truth so that we can build back trust in the intelligence community,” Gabbard said.
Some officials responsible remain in government service, including at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), a government official told the DCNF.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe, a longtime critic of the politicization of intelligence about the origins of COVID he witnessed as DNI during Trump’s first term, will hold individuals accountable, CIA spokesperson Liz Lyons told the DCNF.
“In his first week as director, he declassified and released CIA’s updated assessment, which confirmed what intelligence, science, and commonsense had indicated for so long—that the likely cause of the pandemic was a lab-leak by China,” Lyons said. “Not only has Director Ratcliffe delivered the vital truth about COVID origins to the American people, he’s also rooted out any politicization of intelligence and held people accountable, and will continue to do so.”
‘Customer #1 Was Getting Nothing’
In the winter of 2020, a push for answers from the CCP ran headlong into a coverup led by the official at the top of American biodefense — Fauci. For decades as the director of the National Institute on Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Fauci oversaw the merging of civilian virus research and anti-bioweapons research, including the coronavirus engineering project at the Chinese military-linked lab in Wuhan. (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: Fauci’s First Year Of ‘Retirement’ Was A Money Making Bonanza, Docs Show)
Fauci was granted a full pardon by President Biden on his last day in office, Jan. 20, 2025.
Jon Myers, a former director of regional intelligence in the Pentagon for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the DCNF that he could say with “100% certainty” that in the fall of 2019 he had seen intelligence about an incident at a lab in Wuhan when reviewing traffic on the Pentagon’s secret compartmentalized intelligence machine and had included this information in his “read boards” for commanders.
But that information never reached Trump’s Presidential Daily Brief in January or February 2020, a former senior White House national security official told the DCNF.
“Customer #1 was getting nothing related to the origins,” he said.
Meanwhile, Fauci was routinely advising national security officials in the White House Situation Room — meeting with the National Security Council 16 times over the same period, his calendar shows. Despite his private concerns, Fauci never once mentioned the lab at the pandemic’s epicenter, according to then-Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Robert Redfield.
“My sense is that Fauci had to know all along that the most likely source of the outbreak was the Wuhan laboratory. I was called a conspiracy person. The real conspiracy was the decision to suppress that information from the American public,” Redfield told the DCNF.
Fauci didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Fauci’s Favorites
The intelligence community’s (IC) assessment of COVID’s origins was shaped by Fauci’s inner circle, who had their own thicket of conflicts.
The IC conspicuously omitted documents that some scientists liken to a blueprint for generating COVID-like viruses in the lab: A 2018 research proposal involving the Wuhan lab submitted to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) called “DEFUSE.”
The proposal was eventually transmitted onto classified servers for dissemination under Biden’s 90-day review of the intelligence in 2021. But its incorporation into IC assessments would have directly implicated one of the intelligence community’s own longtime scientific advisors, University of North Carolina coronavirus virologist Ralph Baric.
Baric wrote the coronavirus engineering experiments in the DEFUSE proposal and advised the ODNI on biological threats for 16 years as part of its Biological Sciences Experts Group (BSEG), according to his CV.
Baric appears to have advised the intelligence community on COVID despite the conflict. Baric said he advised the “BSEC” about the novel coronavirus in January 2020, according to a transcript of a 2023 congressional interview. “BSEC” is likely BSEG mis-transcribed, a congressional investigator told DCNF. Baric privately met with Fauci soon after his January meeting informing the intelligence community.
Under congressional interrogation in 2023, Baric claimed that he had advised government officials in 2020 that a lab origin was possible. Yet public records reveal that in a briefing with congressional aides in February 2020, he never mentioned that possibility, instead emphasizing the danger of Chinese wet markets.
Baric did not respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment.
Other virologists who briefed the intelligence community on the COVID origins matter had conflicts of interest through their ties to the Wuhan lab directly, or through their involvement in a Fauci-prompted effort to contain discussion of the lab leak theory in the media and in the scientific community.
Another close collaborator of the Wuhan lab, EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak, communicated with the FBI 13 times from 2020 to 2022 and with Biden’s Office of Science and Technology Policy transition team in 2020, according to a calendar obtained by the DCNF through DRASTIC, an independent research group.
Two virologists with unresolved conflicts of interest briefed the State Department’s intelligence arm, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), in March 2020.
University of Texas Medical Branch lab director James Le Duc, who inked an agreement in 2017 with the Wuhan lab that allowed for the deletion of “secret data,” assured officials that a lab origin was unlikely. Scripps Institute virologist Kristian Andersen, who worked with Fauci on a paper describing a lab origin as “implausible,” said the same.
Both men had privately met with Fauci before advising the INR: Le Duc had met with Fauci on Jan. 23, Fauci’s calendar shows, while Andersen had met with Fauci on Feb. 1 in a secret teleconference with a group of health officials and virologists.
After they briefed the State Department’s intelligence analysts in March 2020 that a lab origin was implausible, Le Duc and Andersen faced pointed questions from the Deputy National Security Advisor Matt Pottinger, according to two sources present for the meeting.
“My takeaway coming away from that meeting was that not everybody wants to solve this,” one of the officials told the DCNF.
Private chats later made available through FOIA indicated Le Duc and Andersen didn’t believe what they had told the IC.
“The lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely,” Andersen had said on Feb. 1, 2020.
“The reason the FBI got the right answer is that they used their own scientists. They didn’t get briefed by Fauci and Kristian Andersen,” said Redfield. “Same thing with the Energy Department, and guess what, they both came up with the right answer. They didn’t have it filtered through this controlled conspiracy to deny the truth.”
Le Duc and Andersen did not respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment.
Spy Scientists Silenced
While Fauci’s inner circle was featured on the New York Times front page, research from the government’s most elite virologists and quantitative biologists withered at the bottom of the intel bureaucracy.
“It’s like keeping a Ferrari in the garage,” one spy scientist told the DCNF. “The million-dollar question is why. I don’t know what was driving the narrative toward a natural origin.”
This pattern emerged across several agencies.
A trio of scientists at the National Medical Intelligence Center (NCMI) within the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) began by February 2020 to link traces of lab manipulation in the COVID virus to research in Wuhan.
The DIA higher-ups were also weighing the genetic analysis pushed by Fauci’s allies in the “Proximal Origin” paper.
By May 2020, the NCMI scientists had concluded that the paper was deeply flawed, documents show. But their rebuttal was rejected by senior officials at DIA as a “scholarly product” and not disseminated.
By June 2020, the NCMI scientists had compiled what one official described as a “smoking gun”: Documents, obtained by U.S. Right to Know through a FOIA lawsuit, showed NCMI spy scientists had detected signatures of engineering in the genome, and that these signatures pointed back to research proposals from the Wuhan and Baric labs.
DIA higher-ups quashed the analysis.
The Z Division — Department of Energy (DOE) scientists who advise on foreign weapons programs — concluded in May 2020 the genome could indicate a lab origin. But when State Department investigators asked the DOE for an update on their analysis that fall, they were rebuffed, two officials told the DCNF.
One of DOE’s national labs conducted analysis on the furin cleavage site — a string of amino acids in the spike making the coronavirus highly transmissible — indicating signs of engineering, an email shows. But DOE Intelligence Chief Steve Black — whose name is redacted but whose title is shown — said it was too technical and did not communicate it to the National Intelligence Council.
Black did not return a request for comment.
Some working within the National Security Council under Pottinger had homed in on Zhou Yusen, a military scientist behind the unusually rapid development of a COVID vaccine. Other officials unearthed more military ties by tracking funding from the People’s Liberation Army Academy of Military Sciences, discrediting the assurances of WIV Senior Scientist Zhengli Shi that the lab’s work was only civilian, even as virologists in Fauci’s orbit defended her.
But Pottinger would soon find himself in the crosshairs of the New York Times and publicly contradicted by the ODNI.
The Rush To Declassify Intel And The Deep Staters Who Obstructed It
The officials in Trump’s first administration who pushed most vigorously for an investigation into a possible lab origin of COVID and to declassify intelligence received blowback from the deep state and their allies in the legacy press.
In early February 2020, Redfield, a virologist, and Pottinger, a former journalist who had reported on the SARS epidemic in China, were poring over binders of evidence that clearly contradicted the narrative that the lab origin theory was a conspiracy theory, Redfield said. Pottinger tasked the IC with digging into both the natural and lab origin theories.
By late April, New York Times reporters on the intelligence beat prepared a story smearing Pottinger’s request as pressure to arrive at a predetermined conclusion, emails show.
Communications officials at the DIA, State Department and ODNI prepared a response to refute the Times’ claims, documents show. Then-DNI Ric Grenell said in an April 29, 2020 email that the “IC wide statement” would say “we are down to two options for covid.”
But the next day, ODNI released an inaccurate and oddly premature statement that there was “wide scientific consensus” the virus could not have been “manmade or genetically modified.”
There was no input from Pottinger’s group at the NSC, rattling some in the White House, one official said.
The statement echoed the dubious assurances of Andersen and Le Duc at the March 2020 State Department briefing, but elided the ongoing scientific debate about the virus’s unusual features.
Nonetheless, the statement was broadcast widely by the legacy press. It has since been deleted.
The same day ODNI released its false statement, the Times published its story about Pottinger. It cast him as “conclusion shopping” akin to the runup to the Iraq War. The Times also cited Fauci’s “Proximal Origin” paper as evidence of a natural origin. The Times had reported earlier that month that the CIA’s experts had not found any evidence of a lab accident.
Less than a month later, when Ratcliffe assumed the role of DNI on May 26, 2020, he asked to see the underlying intelligence. Ratcliffe learned that the preponderance actually pointed to a lab leak.
Later, FBI bioweapons experts — dismissed by others in the intelligence community as “off the reservation” — had concluded the pandemic started from a lab in part through analysis of the virus’s genetic code by the time Biden asked for a 90-day review of the intelligence in 2021, but Biden’s DNI Avril Haines put a lid on it, one spy scientist told the DCNF.
During a 90-day review of the intelligence in 2021, the ODNI sent three warnings throughout the intelligence community not to disseminate findings and instead filter them through the ODNI central office — a contradiction to a recommendation of the 9/11 Commission to encourage intelligence sharing — the spy scientist said. As a result, an FBI interview with a former Wuhan Institute of Virology researcher was never available to the other agencies for consideration, the scientist added.
