The new CIA director, John Ratcliffe, says a Biden administration report concluding that a lab leak likely caused the COVID pandemic was released to show transparency and restore faith in government intelligence agencies.
Three days after being confirmed by the Senate, Ratcliffe spoke of a report that resulted from his predecessor, William Burns, who asked agency analysts and scientists to make a clear determination about how the pandemic started.
The report, which Ratcliffe released Saturday, concluded that the "CIA assessed with low confidence that a research-related origin of the COVID-19 pandemic is more likely than a natural origin based on the available body of reporting."
"I had the opportunity on my first day to make public an assessment that actually took place in the Biden administration, so it can't be accused of being political, and the CIA has assessed that the most likely cause of this pandemic that has wrought so much devastation around the world was because of a lab-related incident in Wuhan, so we'll continue to investigate that moving forward," Ratcliffe said Sunday on Fox News.
"I think it was important for the American people to see an institution like the CIA get off the sidelines and be truthful about what our intelligence shows and, at the same time, protect us from adversaries like China if they caused or contributed to this."
In December, The Wall Street Journal reported that a 2021 intelligence assessment ordered by President Joe Biden on the origin of the COVID-19 virus was rigged to support the Biden administration’s discredited view that the virus originated naturally, and not from a leak from a Chinese biolab.
In his first TV interview since being confirmed, Ratcliffe said releasing the CIA report was one way to support President Donald Trump's push to restore Americans' trust in intel agencies and law enforcement.
"The purpose of the CIA is to protect Americans, to keep us safe from foreign threats and foreign adversaries, but we also need to be truthful with Americans, and he [President Trump] has stressed to me and others that these aren't mutually exclusive missions. We can do both," Ratcliffe told "Sunday Morning Futures" host Maria Bartiromo.
"In the case of the CIA, which is the best foreign intelligence service in the world, after five years, [they did not] have a public assessment to be honest with the American people about where the likely source of a pandemic [was] that killed millions around the world, including a million Americans, and really impacted all 345 million Americans in some way. People lost jobs. They lost houses. They lost their health, they lost their businesses, all of that."
Charlie McCarthy ✉
Charlie McCarthy, a writer/editor at Newsmax, has nearly 40 years of experience covering news, sports, and politics.
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