167. The Covid Origin Story: What the CIA Really Found (Ep 2)

19:24Gordon:Like frozen food, right? It was like frozen food that had been brought in.

19:28David:I mean, there was a theory that like an American, I think, sports team had come to China and they might have brought it. You know, there were all these kind of theories Part of that politicisation was China being accused of covering something up, acting very defensively, perhaps because it's being accused, perhaps because it's got something to hide, but certainly not being open to a kind of joint investigation or an openness which would help you get that answer. You've immediately got a massive obstacle here, which means that, you know, I guess you're stuck doing spy work to try and get the answer.

20:05Gordon:I think the spy work is never going to give you the answer. And this is David McCloskey's hypothesis. But I think that the Chinese government, there's no secret investigation that's been ordered. I think for this very reason. I think if you're Xi Jinping, do you want an answer to this question?

20:27David:no do you want to know that it could be a lab leak no you don't want to know because as soon

20:31Gordon:as you know you have a trail of paper and people who have that secret and it can it can be leaked to journalists or it could be collected by the cia or maybe even maybe even mi6 gordon you know so like you don't you don't want that to exist at all yeah so you don't ask so you don't ask

20:52David:You don't ask. You just give out the order which says, move on. Nothing to see here, which is exactly what we get.

21:01Gordon:My theory is that you're never going to get an answer to this because the Chinese have basically said, we're not even going to create the secret that could be leaked or collected.

21:12David:That could be stolen.

21:13Gordon:And ultimately, the report, this first intelligence community report that comes out in or is kind of broadly declassified in October of 2021, basically says that to confirm the natural outbreak, you're going to need to get to the first cases, which the Chinese government's not going to do to confirm the natural origins hypothesis. And then to confirm the lab incident, you'd have to either get cooperation from the Chinese or, and they don't say it exactly this way, but they basically say, we're going to have to steal information that will yield new insights. And that information would probably come from China's own investigations into the COVID-19 outbreak, which I think is not going to happen.

21:58So this is a conundrum.

22:01Gordon:And you get to this point where I really think this is a great case study in how when the intelligence community when the spies basically say, we don't know, which I think is more or less what this thing is. We don't know. There's no consensus. When you have the FBI saying moderate conference, but it's a mess of an intelligence assessment from a policymaker's standpoint, I think it's a vortex politics fillet, right? Because it's a hugely politically contentious

22:31David:question. People want an answer. People want an answer. The public and politicians want an answer. and politically it may be useful for some politicians to have a particular answer. There's an answer which it seems some politicians might prefer or want, which also add to the pressures in this case. So I guess this is where we get into the politics of this and where politics and intelligence meet, don't we?

22:54Gordon:I think it's worth setting up a key character in the rest of this drama, which is John Ratcliffe, who was the director of national intelligence under Trump in 2020 and 2021. So for much of the pandemic, he is now the CIA director. And that'll be important as we get to the end of this episode. So Radcliffe, he's a lawyer and former small town mayor. He was the mayor of Heath, Texas, population 12 ,000. Is that near you? Where's that? It's pretty close. It's just east of Dallas on a lake called Rockwall. so it's a little like little township i i have never been to heath texas but if we have anyone listening from heath texas you know hello heath much love much love to heath so rackliff uh after being the mayor of heath texas becomes the u.s attorney for the eastern district of texas um it's a reputation as a hardliner particularly on immigration in 2014 he's elected to congress He'll wind up on the intelligence, the judiciary, and the Homeland Security Committee.

23:59Gordon:Those are different committees. Only spend a year on the Intelligence Committee, though. He's a China hawk, big China hawk, and a major Trump ally through the kind of rocky impeachment years. And he has named the DNI in 2020.

24:17David:Director of National Intelligence, yeah.

24:19Gordon:Exactly. Now, Radcliffe's name had been floated back in 2019, but he withdrew after five days about questions about his experience and qualifications, a point that we're having right now with the acting DNI, Bill Pulte. Mortgage man. And it's interesting because past DNIs had typically been drawn from military roles or had national security experience. Radcliffe kind of doesn't, right? I mean, he's a political guy, right? And as a result, the Senate confirms him on a 49-44 party line vote, which is in sharp contrast to Trump's first DNI during that term, a guy named Dan Coats, who was confirmed 85 to 12, right?

25:06Gordon:And Coats had national security experience as an ambassador and a long tenure as a senator. Anyhow, Ratcliffe is big on China. He's a China hawk and thus big on the lab leak theory. And in August of 2021, so when he's no longer the DNI, when he's kind of out of office.

25:31David:Biden is now, yeah.

25:33Gordon:Biden is now president. Radcliffe writes an op-ed for Fox News where he writes that the lab leak theory was not just a possibility, but closer to a probability or near certainty. Wow. And notes that he had seen no evidence during his tenure as DNI of natural spillover. Very strong opinions. And he was a kind of controversial DNI. I mean, he had focused during his tenure on CIA analysis of Chinese intervention at the 2020 US election. There had been a kind of nasty back and forth with the intelligence community's analytic ombudsman that looked at this assessment and basically said that, you know, Ratcliffe had, the analysts said this, that Ratcliffe had outrageously misrepresented their analysis on China.

26:27Gordon:just because he disagreed with the analytic line that the analysts had put out there and kind of put his own warning in at the last minute. So he's got a bit of a China hawk mentality that is going to feed into the lab leak theory.

26:41David:And it's interesting. So if we think about it politically at this point, he was in office, so he's seen the intelligence. He's now out of office. And it's fair to say that he and some other Republican hawks are certainly going to push the lab leak hypothesis and also start to suggest the idea that maybe even not just a cover-up in China, but even a cover-up in Washington, that Washington has been trying to avoid pinning the blame on the Chinese government for a lab leak and that the intelligence community's assessments have somehow been pushed, pressured, emphasised away from coming to that conclusion.

27:19David:So this is now becoming a political weapon with which to beat the Biden administration to say, you are not being tough enough on China. You are not willing to face the facts that there is evidence for lab leak. That's what's kind of going on politically, isn't there, at this point?

27:35Gordon:I mean, at this point, you don't have the scientific answer to the question. You don't have the intelligence community standing up and saying, we have the answer to the question. So you have this massive gap, this void, right? And the politics need to fill it. So very soon you have Congress getting into the fray. So House Republicans on what's called HIPC, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, so it is the House Oversight Committee, decide that they need their own document. And they put out a report in 2022 that basically says that the intelligence community's document ignored important information and suppressed the lab leak hypothesis for political purposes.

28:25Gordon:So this HIPSEE document makes the politicization claim running the other way. So it's the politicians and their staffers who accuse the intelligence community of actually playing politics, which again reminds me of the claims we investigated in our Russian election interference series on the CIA or the intelligence community kind of playing politics with Trump-Russia connections to allegedly help Hillary. So it's a kind of similar argument that you have these really politicized kind of deep state elements inside the intelligence community who are suppressing the truth. and the HIPSE report, I don't think we need to get into all of the evidence here, but they make a circumstantial case that the COVID virus, SARS-CoV-2, may have been tied to China's biological weapons research program and could have escaped during a lab incident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

29:26David:So that's putting them at, you know, about the different theories within LabLeak. I mean, here they are going to, if you like, the more extreme end, which is that this is actually linked to biological weapons research. So not just that it was gain of function for health research, but that actually this was a kind of covert secret program by the People's Liberation Army, which was somehow working out of this institute. And they present, I think, all kinds of bits of evidence for it. I mean, that's a pretty extreme end claim, isn't it?

30:00Gordon:It is. And look, it's worth maybe just setting a couple pieces of the evidence they present. Because, for example, they look and they say there's a 2015 book that was edited by PLA affiliated scientists, that's the Chinese military, that discussed weaponizing engineered coronaviruses and the supposed advantages of deniability there. And the congressional report that we're talking about says, look, the intelligence community's public assessment never mentions this book. This is a key piece of circumstantial evidence for that case. Why is it not mentioned?

30:34David:Pretty circumstantial.

30:35Gordon:It is very circumstantial. And look, the language that the congressional Republicans use in the overall assessment, I think, is quite soft. They don't say definitively that it's a lab engineered bioweapon. They say there are indications that the virus, quote, may have been tied to China's biological weapons research program and could have escaped during a lab incident. But that report is very helpful politically because they claim, they then go into some detail to say, look, the intelligence community's declassified assessment is misleading. They say that the intelligence community reported confidence levels for nearly every judgment, except the claim that the virus was not developed as a biological weapon.

31:19Gordon:So they say, why is that the case? The congressional report says that omission let the public assume that the question was more settled than the underlying intelligence warranted. They also say that the classified version dismissed or omitted relevant intelligence. It kind of reminds me a little bit when we did our series on Iraq, WMD, and the vice president's office would put together reports and they would weight different pieces of intelligence differently than the CIA would, for example. And so they'd have to come over and sit down and go through these reams of information to see, well, okay, how are you racking and stacking the different little bits of intelligence?

32:00Gordon:And I think in this case, you know, the congressional Republicans are basically saying we want to take these pieces of circumstantial evidence and give them more weight than the intelligence community gave them. They also charge, the congressional Republicans charge that the intelligence community refused to tell Congress which outside scientific experts the IC, the intelligence community consulted on that assessment. Because obviously, this is a scientific intelligence question. And it's not just like the China political analysts who are answering these questions. There's scientific experts the IC brought in to help with the drafting of that assessment.

32:36David:And we should say what they're doing here is not so much, well, they're partly attacking the intelligence community and they're partly attacking the Biden era leaders of that intelligence community, particularly Avril Haines, who was the director of national intelligence. So it's a kind of dual attack almost, isn't it, on the intelligence community stroke deep state, but really on the Biden administration, having failed to be honest and open up about scientists and about the level of evidence.

33:03Gordon:So maybe there, Gordon, with the intelligence politics in full swing. Let's take a break. And when we come back, we'll see how a new CIA director finally compels the CIA to take a position on COVID. We'll see whether that's correcting the record on a politically driven assessment or creating one all itself.

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34:54David:well welcome back so this question of where covid19 came from is becoming increasingly political and increasingly fraught and we're going to get report after report aren't we david which is basically trying to score political points off this well that's right the intelligence

35:13Gordon:community will wade back into the fray again in 2023 when the Office of the Director of National Intelligence releases a paper looking at the links between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the origin of the pandemic. Now, this report had been mandated by a congressional act in 2023, which had called for the intelligence community to declassify all information it had relating to potential links between that Wuhan Institute and the origin of the pandemic. So the report goes deep into web safety practices, links to the Chinese military and security establishment, but it says all agencies continue to assess that both hypotheses, the natural origins in the lab leak, remain plausible.

36:02Gordon:Disappointing. Right. It's disappointing. It's yet another disappointing piece of paper that's come out of the intelligence community. The Department of Energy has updated its assessment, you'd be pleased to know, Gordon, to a low confidence one that it was a lab mishap, but the underlying intelligence that assessment was based on was never released. The FBI still has moderate confidence and all the other agencies are divided.

36:27David:I'm slightly struggling to understand why the Department of Energy is offering its intelligence assessment. I know they have some roles in nuclear

36:36Gordon:weapons well they're tied in with all the national all the national labs yeah and all the national labs okay everybody's everybody's got an intelligence agency you don't have 18 intelligence agencies gordon this is america no we don't and all with different levels of confidence and all

36:51David:arguing with each other about how confident they are and changing it it basically gives you gives everyone room to say well there's no answer but hey you know someone agrees with me and someone less so, but who cares? It's a mess. It is a mess.

37:06Gordon:And let's make it even worse because do you remember that piece of intelligence that we talked about at the start of this episode, those three researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology who had gotten ill in November of 2019 and on the face of it, that seems to lean toward a lab leak hypothesis, right? Because it would suggest that it's not the market that's the source of the virus, it's the Wuhan Institute of virology and the market is probably like a super spreader event. It's not the source, right? So those three researchers who got sick, the DNI report goes deeper into that. And it says the IC continues to assess that this information neither supports nor refutes either hypothesis of the pandemic's origins because the symptoms could have been caused by a number of diseases.

37:52Gordon:And some of the symptoms were not consistent with COVID-19. We have no indications that any of these researchers were hospitalized because of the symptoms consistent with COVID-19. One researcher may have been hospitalized in this timeframe for treatment of a non-respiratory medical condition.

38:08David:Again, I say disappointing. It's disappointing. So we're stuck, aren't we, at this point?

38:14Gordon:Well, so the report, interestingly, the way it's been used as a political football since, the report gives a little bit of grist to lab leak proponents because you now have an intelligence community document that comments on the Wuhan Institute of Virology's safety procedures, the genetic engineering capabilities that it had, and its connections to the Chinese military. Again, it's all circumstantial. It has, it doesn't make the case that it's a lab leak around this virus, but it gives, frankly, it gives politicians something to point to, to say, well, look at these guys, you know, they've got this institute, lacks safety, they're genetically engineering viruses there, they're linked in with the military establishment, right?

38:56Gordon:Again, doesn't make the case, but politically, it's very helpful. So I think that DNI report, it's certainly not conclusive. It's frustrating, as you've identified. I mean, there's a little bit more there for lab leak proponents, because you now have an intelligence community document that says some negative things about the WIB's safety procedures, its genetic engineering capabilities, its connections to the Chinese military establishment. But again, we still don't have a satisfying intelligence community assessment on COVID origins. But in late 2023, a whistleblower appears.

39:34David:Love a whistleblower.

39:35Gordon:Gotta love a whistleblower, don't you? The leaders of two house committees send a letter to then CIA Director Bill Burns, friend of the pod, publicizing testimony that they had received from this individual. They describe him as a multi-decade senior CIA officer. And the whistleblower claims that the CIA had a seven-person team, although some of the reports have a different number, but a relatively small team, sometimes called the COVID Discovery Team. And these were officers that had significant scientific expertise, and they were tasked with assessing the pandemic's origin. Now, according to this whistleblower, six of the seven members concluded that the virus most likely originated from a lab, only the most senior officer favoring the natural origins hypothesis.

40:27Gordon:But then explosively, he claims that the CIA is said to have offered those six scientists a monetary incentive to change their position to favor natural origins. And of course, this gets framed in much of the kind of more right wing media environment as the CIA having bribed its officers. So it's a big claim. yeah uh very big i will note spoiler alert the whistleblower is later going to change his tune on the bribery piece of this in particular it's a totally preposterous claim gordon i have to say as you you doubtless be surprised to hear me say that i find that no one at the ca would be capable no one at the c who would be capable of bribery at such an institution but it's go bars

41:16David:it doesn't sorry anyway this doesn't ring

41:21Gordon:I don't know this for me doesn't pass the sniff test the gold bars passes the sniff test ironically that you have a really you know sort of crooked operations officer who set up his own classified intelligence program and is using it to embezzle tens of millions of dollars that makes more sense to me that's more plausible than this that is more plausible to me than this the CIA unsurprisingly He strongly rejects the whistleblower's claim in a statement that it releases within hours, says it's bogus. A number of virologists publicly doubt the story's plausibility as well. You know, one of the committee chairs who'd actually released this testimony or made pieces of it public acknowledges the limits of this, says, look, these are just allegations.

42:05Gordon:But Ratcliffe, John Ratcliffe, picks up the claim in an op-ed that he writes for the Wall Street Journal that ends up with the title, although they don't write the titles, right? But the title ends up being the CIA politicizes intelligence on China and COVID. And Radcliffe is careful in that op-ed. He does not directly endorse the claims, but he gives them a lot of space. And in that op-ed, he makes the broader point that there's a trend inside CIA to politicize intelligence on China and that the suppression of the lab leak theory is just one example. And he wrote, when we pushed to declassify intelligence, exposing some of what the US government knew about the virus's origins and the Communist Party's initial coverup, we faced constant opposition, particularly from Langley.

42:56Gordon:And he says that every shred of intelligence pointed to the likelihood of a lab leak.

43:00David:Every shred. Wow. Okay.

43:02Gordon:So you have, again, you have John Ratcliffe, who at this point is not back in government, who's out. I believe he was doing a fellowship at the Heritage Foundation, amongst other things, is really this lable theory and the back and forth, the politics and the intelligence around it is a very live issue going into 2023 and 2024.

43:27David:Which of course we should say is also an election year. And then in 2024, we get another report, don't we? More reports. Another report, because we love a report from the House Select Committee. But this is a Republican led committee. So again, it's pushing the politics of it, isn't it? And the idea of lab leak.

43:49Gordon:Right, because Republicans are now in the majority. And there's this big select subcommittee report on the pandemic and they deliver their final report. And by the way, if you're listening to this episode and you're confused about the number of reports, I think that the number of different investigative committees is actually directly related to the fact that the intelligence community's assessment was so uncertain and ambiguous, right? And into that uncertainty de-step the politics, and you have a desire and need by congressional Republicans in this case to have official documents that back up the lab leak theory.

44:34David:And this document really does push the lab leak theory, doesn't it? I mean, it's pretty clear that it thinks it's a lab leak. I mean, likely emerged from a laboratory or research-related incident. The weight of evidence increasingly supports the lab leak hypothesis. I find it so interesting because the language, as a journalist, you're trained to look at this language pretty carefully. And they're pushing people towards the lab leak, but they're also careful to say, we still don't know for sure. You know, it's interesting, isn't it? It's still caveated, but trying to really kind of push that argument.

45:07Gordon:And it is an interesting little case study in how the intelligence community's assessments are used in these political documents because they pull information from the ODNI report on the Wuhan Institute of Virology that came out in 2023, and they kind of strip away the caveats and the uncertainty. They ignore the principal finding that both the lab leak and natural origins hypothesis are plausible. And this report from House Republicans actually has testimony from John Ratcliffe, who says that his bottom line up front was that his informed assessment as a person with as much access as anyone to our government's intelligence during the initial year of the pandemic has been and continues to be that a lab leak is the only explanation credibly supported by the state.

46:03Gordon:our intelligence, by science, and by common sense. From a view inside the IC, the intelligence community, if our intelligence and evidence supporting a lab leak theory was placed side by side with our intelligence and evidence pointed to a natural origins or spillover theory, which by the way is what the IC assessments have been trying to do, the lab leak side of the ledger, Ratcliffe says, would be long convincing, even overwhelming, while the spillover side would be nearly empty and tenuous.

46:30David:It's so interesting that Radcliffe's testimony is being used, you know, as someone who says he saw the intelligence because he was on the inside. His judgment is being used as one of the kind of key bases for this report's judgment. So it's still, you know, kind of compounding this political pressure to come to the lab leak hypothesis.

46:50Gordon:We talked in the first episode about this Trump statement about how, you know, in the early days of the pandemic where, okay, it came out of a lab in Wuhan and I've seen intelligence on that, but I can't share it with you. And he's saying that at the same time as the IC, the intelligence community is putting out a statement saying, we don't know where it came from really. We're investigating all options. Radcliffe is basically saying, he's almost proving the point that many tried to raise in the spring of 2020, that the intelligence community was sitting on intelligence, suppressing the intelligence that would make the Labley case plausible.

47:29Gordon:Ratcliffe is actually making that argument in his testimony here. Yeah.

47:34David:Yeah. And then we get another review, don't we, by the end of 2024?

47:39Gordon:We get another review.

47:40David:Because that's what we needed. No more answers, but more reviews, please. Well, I find this one to be fascinating and frankly, a bit of a political miscalculation

47:50Gordon:because in December of 2024, so after Biden's lost the election, it's his last month in office, he authorizes yet another review of the available intelligence on COVID origins. And this is done under the auspices of Bill Burns, who's the CIA director at the time. And I think this is a massive backfire because the bottom line from this due assessment is that the CIA assesses 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. They continue to assess both hypotheses are plausible, but they've bumped up from basically we're not making a call to we're making a call with low confidence.

48:36Gordon:And the reason I think this is a backfire or ends up backfiring, frankly, on the Biden administration is that I think the intentions are good, which is we've got this logjam in the intelligence community around the COVID origins assessment. Let's have another look at it and see if we get a different answer or get a better answer or we get the answer. And yet it backfires because as the CIA increases its assessment to low confidence, you as a policymaker, who is perhaps a little bit politically oriented, now have ammunition to release the assessment, strip aside the confidence statement, and claim that the Biden administration has been sitting on this the whole time.

49:25Gordon:That's the ammunition you're given, and as we'll see, that's exactly how it gets used.

49:29David:But it is a big deal, because in the one hand, they're saying, yeah, it's low confidence, but a research-related origin - They've changed it, yeah. is more likely than a natural origin. I mean, but with low confidence. So it's like the most frustrating situation, but it is a shift, but just with low confidence. But you're right, that provides the ammunition for the new incoming Trump administration to basically be able to go, well, the CIA were hiding the fact that they actually did think it might be something that came out of a land.

50:01Gordon:When you dig into why did the assessment change? The conclusion was not based on fresh intelligence. That's clear. But it was based on analysis of the spread of the virus, its scientific properties, and the working conditions of China's virology labs. so again there's not a it wouldn't be low confidence if there were really really if there was really good scientific information or if there actually had been a chinese investigation in secret into the origins of the virus that somehow ca got access to you'd probably have higher than low confidence yeah so again it's this is this is very unsatisfying but but it's as i said earlier this is enough because it is declassified and released on the first day of the new Trump administration by incoming CIA director John Ratcliffe.

50:52David:None other than John Ratcliffe.

50:53Gordon:None other than John Ratcliffe. And Ratcliffe said he released this because he wanted CIA off the sidelines, his words in the origins debate. And the release of the assessment, I thought this was fascinating, was meant to restore Americans' trust in our own institutions. So I think that is a strong implication that the CIA, the intelligence community more broadly, had been covering something up.

51:17David:So which fits in with the new Trump administration, deep state narrative of intelligence community, which under Biden had been turned into a political tool and had not been willing to confront the truth about things. So, you know, the politicization is absolutely there. One thing we should we should talk about is the whistleblower, because that that that you tease that we will we'll hear a bit more about him. We do learn who he is, don't we? And what what actually was the situation with him?

51:45Gordon:We do, because as recently as last month, so May of 2026, the whistleblower whose name is James Erdman III has been submitting testimony to a congressional committee that's being chaired by Rand Paul. And Erdman, he's a career CIA operations officer. I think he joined in 2013, who from March of 2025 to April of 2026 had been on an assignment to the Director's Initiatives Group, which is this task force that Tulsi Gabbard was running over at the DNI and had been stood up to kind of look at the implementation of a number of Trump's executive orders on declassification, the JFK assassination, and one of them was COVID origins.

52:34Gordon:And this whistleblower, James Erdman, his core claim was that the CIA's scientific analysts repeatedly concluded that a lab leak was the most likely origin and that managers, none of whom were scientific subject matter experts, overrode them. And he says that the agency had an effort ongoing in 2022 and 2023 to do a relook at the findings from that initial Biden era 90 day sprint. Team gets assigned, he says it's seven technical experts and three generalist analysts, and that eight of the 10 had supported the lab leak at low confidence, one at medium. But that when a draft that was looking like it was going to head toward a lab leak assessment reached the front office, it got changed.

53:24Gordon:that managers change the analytic line to something like, we may never precisely know the origin of the virus. And Erdman says that the changes were made at 1.53 AM with track changes that don't show who made them and that the precisely wording was chosen to discourage further inquiry.

53:43David:It's like a kind of Agatha Christie mystery. Who was in the office at 1.53 AM? Who anonymously changed a document to alter the conclusions? can we find the suspect? You need Poirot or someone to do it. And what about the bribery claims? Because he claimed about bribery. He walks them back. Okay.

54:02Gordon:He walks those back. Actually, when I was first reading the accounts of the bribery claims, I thought that he was probably referring to exceptional performance awards, which are things you get, if you're on a task force that does something important, everyone could get a... It used to be that they gave you gift certificates to restaurants, actually, and those were really highly prized, but they stopped doing that. And now they have these awards, like a mini, mini bonus. And his account, which, again, he changes his tune on this, says that the LabLeak analyst received a$1 ,500 exceptional performance award.

54:42Gordon:Well, one non-specialist who actually favored the Natural Origins Theory received four times that amount. So that claim kind of falls apart. And he basically documents, it's similar to the congressional oversight reports that have come out, because he basically highlights some instances where information, some of it circumstantial, that leans toward the lab leak hypothesis was not included in intelligence reports. So, I mean, one of them he mentioned was that, you know, there was a national lab report done by the Department of Energy back in May of 2020 that, for example, found all of the preconditions for a lab leak existed at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

55:28Gordon:And he says this didn't make it into any intelligence community products in 2020. So why is that? Right. Open question. Yeah.

55:35David:It's interesting, though, because as well, back to politics, Erdman, this whistleblower, also seems to have a political viewpoint. Is that fair to say?

55:46Gordon:I think that's fair to say. He's the co-founder of Feds for Freedom, which is a federal employee. We do love freedom. It's a group of federal employees built around opposing COVID vaccine mandates. He's also a very vocal Dr. Anthony Fauci critic. I think maybe even more important than his political leanings are that most of his testimony is secondhand and is cited to other unnamed whistleblowers. So we have a sort of chain of custody in this information that you may not have confidence in because you can't get to the ultimate source, which is a problem in the intelligence world.

56:28David:And you're back to politics Because, you know, as you said, whether he's got a political agenda, we can't kind of impute that. But he's linked to groups which oppose vaccines and perhaps do have an agenda. And certainly his views are being used as politics. So once again, you just have this feeling that politics has kind of soured all of the relationships and all of the discussions at the heart of this subject, increasingly so.

56:57Gordon:it's it's an unsatisfying i find this to be a very unsatisfying conclusion because the whole thing is just an absolute mess yeah but for me this is a great case study in how difficult it can be what you are i mean like us now we're sitting outside of the intelligence community we don't have firsthand access to this information because the key question is well who politicized it do we think it was the politicians or do we think it was people inside the intelligence community with a political agenda? The war over this question comes down to that. And I find there's not going to be diagnostic, very clear information that comes out, which I think is part of the point.

57:51Gordon:I think it's part of the political war around this is you make it very hard to get to the bottom of this and create a swirl of information and additional reports that have all kinds of, you know, high to low quality of information. You throw this stuff in, put it out there and make it really hard for people to know what actually happened or what the truth might be.

58:11David:I do think that moment where Donald Trump, President Trump, initially when COVID starts, says, I think this is lab leak and starts to push the direction, immediately injects a level of politics into it. And I remember what was so interesting as a journalist covering it was that then everyone went, well, he's only saying that because he wants to bash China because that's what he does. And we don't always believe what he says. But then the frustration of, what's the evidence, the lack of evidence, the fact that there was evidence, but it wasn't being seen properly, just creates this confusion where it becomes impossible to see this through anything but a political lens, it feels like.

58:59David:It feels like you've got to take sides with so many of these questions. And if you take sides, you're taking a view on whether you agree with Donald Trump or disagree with Donald Trump, or whether you think there's a deep state or not, or whether you think China is good or bad. And immediately, rather than kind of looking at it objectively, you end up having to take a side in a polarized debate. And I think it's that way in which intelligence and politics have got mixed and polarized, which is the problem. And I think this is a perfect example of that and this debate about that, where you end up with two camps opposing each other and looking for evidence which supports their position.

59:42David:I don't know which one is true. But all I know is that that's not a healthy thing.

59:49Gordon:If I were to put my more conspiratorial hat on for a second and say, well, how would we know if there had actually been an effort inside the CIA or any other element of the intelligence community to kind of to suppress a lab leak theory. Politicization is really hard to see. It's hard to confirm. It's very hard to pin down. So, you know, they're going with this whistleblower said, like that would be a pretty stark, even that can't really be proven, but that would be a stark example of, you know, a manager twisting the arm of six, seven analysts to say, change your tune. It could be what to an outsider looks like politicization saying, oh, why didn't you include this report or that report in some kind of official assessment can also be the natural outgrowth of a bureaucratic process and an intelligence process to like make sense of a really complicated world and try to weight information appropriately.

1:00:52Gordon:And to an outsider, it's like the outcome could look political, but in fact, the process itself was anything but. So it's not the kind of question we're ever going to get an answer to, but probably much like COVID origins itself. But I think that this has been a good case study in how intelligence and politics are, how they interact with each other. And I think, frankly, something that we're likely to see a lot more of in the future over really important intelligence questions like the nature of COVID.

1:01:34David:Which I think does not necessarily bode well. and I'm afraid if you were hoping for an answer to to the origins of COVID I don't think we've got one I'm not sure we'll ever get one that's that's also I just think you know if there was an answer somewhere in China I think it it's been well suppressed I don't think it's in their interest as you said to discover it so I think it's going to continue to be a mystery rather than a secret that can be uncovered and as a result I think open to politics and more politicization you know which is a bit of a tragedy when it is, you know, COVID was something which changed the world.

1:02:11David:It's a really important question. Yeah, it's really important. Yeah. And we may never get to the bottom of it.

1:02:16Gordon:Yeah. Well, we hope you've enjoyed this deep dive into the different theories around COVID's origins, the intelligence story around it. You know, as always, you don't have to wait to get these series. You know, you can just go to the restisclassified.com, sign up for the Declassified Club there, all sorts of goodies. hope you've enjoyed this one and we will see you next time see you next time