CIA analysts concluded multiple times that COVID-19 most likely originated from a laboratory, but intelligence leaders repeatedly altered those findings in official summaries later offered to the public, a CIA whistleblower testified Wednesday before the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee.
James Erdman III, a longtime Central Intelligence Agency operations officer who was recently assigned to a detail investigating COVID origins within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, testified under subpoena that analysts inside the CIA and the broader intelligence community favored a laboratory-origin assessment in the years immediately following the pandemic’s outbreak. But CIA managers suppressed or altered those conclusions, he asserted.
“CIA scientific analysts concluded multiple times between 2021 and 2023 that a lab leak was the most-likely origin of COVID-19,” Erdman said. “Yet those conclusions never shaped the official narrative.”
Erdman also submitted a written statement to the committee elaborating on many of the allegations raised during his testimony, though that document has not been publicly released. According to Erdman and senators during the hearing, the statement included additional details about alleged intelligence community obstruction and oversight concerns.
The hearing, chaired by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), also produced new allegations about internal disputes, conflicts of interest in outside scientific influence and what Erdman described as a coordinated effort to steer intelligence agencies away from favoring a lab-leak conclusion. He implicated CIA management, outside virologists and federal health officials, including former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci.
The CIA dismissed the proceedings as “dishonest political theater masquerading as a congressional hearing,” according to a statement by CIA spokesperson Liz Lyons. The statement, which was issued before the hearing had even concluded, noted that Erdman previously had testified in a closed-door meeting with committee members and contended the public hearing was politically motivated.
Aside from his role as a CIA operations officer, Erdman, a former Army Ranger, also co-founded Feds for Freedom. The conservative-leaning group formed by federal employees, which opposes COVID-era vaccine mandates and other pandemic policies, has been a vocal critic of Fauci. According to the organization’s website, Erdman previously worked in biotech and bioinformatics and served in federal assignments across Europe, the Middle East and Asia.
After his assignment on the ODNI detail investigating COVID origins ended, Erdman returned to the CIA in April, he testified.
“I’ve got a desk,” he said. “They’re talking to me about what comes next.”
Analysts overruled
Among Erdman’s most detailed allegations Wednesday was his account of an internal 2022-2023 re-examination of COVID origins involving 10 CIA analysts, including seven technical “subject matter experts.” Erdman testified that the team initially drafted an assessment concluding that the pandemic likely had a laboratory origin, with eight of the 10 analysts “definitely leaning in on lab leak.”
Erdman testified that after the draft was submitted to CIA management, managers provided the analysts with a new report that purportedly contradicted their findings and instructed them to “go back to the drawing board and do a reassessment.”
But by the end of that review, six of the seven of the team’s technical experts still concluded the evidence favored a lab leak, Erdman testified. CIA management then rewrote the conclusion, replacing the analysts’ findings with the line: “We may never precisely know the origins of SARS-CoV-2,” Erdman alleged.
“`Precisely’ is not a term analysts use,” Erdman said. “It’s a word you use when you want to deliberately end discussion.”
Sen. Paul said that investigators on Erdman’s team at ODNI who reviewed intelligence records found evidence suggesting that officials were leaning toward a lab-leak conclusion as of Aug. 12, 2021, during preparations for the intelligence community’s formal public COVID origins assessment ordered by President Biden that summer. But before the assessment was released days later, analysts’ conclusions appeared to abruptly shift course, he said. The assessment ultimately concluded that both natural and lab-leak origins scenarios were plausible.
When Erdman and other investigators tried to obtain records to explain the report’s apparent analytic shift, the CIA refused to provide relevant documents, Paul said.
“We can’t – we have no idea why that changed,” Paul said.
Erdman accused the CIA of broader obstruction, testifying that the agency “refused to provide information necessary to understand why analytic standards at the CIA were violated.” He added that the agency “illegally monitored the computer and phone usage” of personnel involved in the ODNI investigation. He also alleged retaliation against at least one contractor assisting the probe.
Such problems extended beyond individual misconduct and reflected systemic failures within the agency, Erdman said.
“The only way you can solve this is with real accountability,” he said, before urging Congress to use its budgetary authority to reform the problems within the intelligence community.
The pattern of obstruction suggested in Erdman’s testimony hasn’t been limited to congressional investigators. Since the onset of the pandemic in early 2020, politicians, journalists, scientists and other watchdogs have tried to surface records on COVID origins from U.S. spy agencies with little success. U.S. Right To Know, a nonprofit newsroom and public health watchdog, has filed more than 220 FOI requests and 45 lawsuits seeking records from the CIA, ODNI, FBI and other federal agencies. The CIA has repeatedly withheld or heavily redacted records in those cases, frequently citing national-security exemptions or even refusing to confirm or deny the existence of responsive documents. Several of those cases remain ongoing.
Fauci’s alleged role
The hearing’s most explosive allegation centered on Fauci, whom Erdman accused of deliberately shaping which scientific experts the intelligence community consulted with in its COVID origins investigations.
“Dr. Fauci’s role in the cover-up was intentional,” Erdman testified. “Dr. Fauci influenced the analytical process and findings by leveraging his position to ensure the IC consulted with a conflicted list of curated subject-matter experts.”
While Erdman stopped short of alleging explicit coercion, he described Fauci as controlling the pipeline of outside scientific opinion flowing into the intelligence community. He also said that the experts Fauci steered analysts toward were the same scientists who published the influential paper that dismissed a lab origin.
“He provided a curated list of subject matter experts, which coincidentally wrote “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” Erdman testified.
Neither Fauci nor the NIH press office immediately responded to requests for comment sent Wednesday about Erdman’s testimony.
The same outside scientists brought in to advise intelligence analysts also had financial and professional incentives to steer findings away from a lab-leak conclusion, Erdman said. Among those he identified as sources of concern were members of the ODNI’s “Biological Sciences Experts Group,” or BSEG, which included prominent University of North Carolina virologist Ralph Baric, a federally-funded collaborator on coronavirus research with scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Erdman said such BSEG scientists were simultaneously advising intelligence agencies while participating in federally funded biodefense research and maintaining professional ties to the WIV – the Chinese institution at the center of scrutiny for its possible role in the pandemic.
“The BSEG scientists influenced National Laboratory WMD research policy decisions, finished analysis and other intelligence matters, creating misaligned incentives and conflicts of interest,” Erdman testified.
When asked whether intelligence officials were deliberately trying to protect China, Erdman said motivations were difficult to determine. But he described a culture inside parts of the intelligence community that was deeply resistant to favoring a laboratory origin. He said this was apparently driven less by explicit coordination than by overlapping institutional interests linking agencies, outside advisers, federal research dollars and public health officials.
“Nobody wanted the lab leak conclusion,” Erdman said, recounting what he said one scientist told investigators.
Withheld intelligence
Wednesday’s hearing also intensified disputes over whether the intelligence community has fully complied with the COVID-19 Origin Act, a law unanimously passed by Congress in 2023 requiring declassification of “any and all” intelligence tied to possible links between the WIV and the pandemic’s origins, and a report on that intelligence.
What Congress got in response was a five-page summary from ODNI cataloging where each intelligence agency stood on the origins question, with most backing a natural origins hypothesis. But none of the underlying analyses, assessments and raw intelligence that shaped those positions were released. The gap between the thin summary made public and the records that were withheld has since become a sore point for lawmakers and transparency advocates. Since then, dribs and drabs of records have periodically surfaced through FOIA requests and lawsuits, indicating far more intelligence exists than what has been publicly summarized.
Through a FOIA lawsuit last year, U.S. Right to Know pried loose a June 2020 genomic analysis of SARS-CoV-2 prepared by the Defense Intelligence Agency’s National Center for Medical Intelligence – one of the few full analytical assessments by a U.S. intelligence element to publicly surface. That technical slide presentation prepared by government scientists walked through the virus’s genetic characteristics and the WIV’s research capabilities to conclude it was plausible that SARS-CoV-2 was lab-engineered and escaped from containment. But that finding never appeared in the ODNI public report.
During Wednesday’s hearing, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), the sponsor of the COVID-19 Origin Act, displayed the five-page report and asked Erdman whether it represented the full scope of responsive intelligence records.
“That is not all the information,” Erdman replied.
He testified that ODNI is now working through approximately 2,000 pages for an initial release, with many more documents beyond that.
Erdman also alleged that the existing ODNI public release contained false statements about no evidence linking WIV research to SARS-CoV-2, or a research-related incident involving its employees.
Asked directly whether those statements were true, Erdman replied: “No, they’re not true.”
He added that, at the same time the ODNI summary report was being drafted, the National Intelligence Council was already undertaking a more extensive review and writing a classified report on COVID origins.
“I assumed they would just take that classified report and redact it,” Erdman said. “But that is not what happened.” Instead, ODNI released “a different paper” – the summary document.
Despite the alleged suppression of intelligence conclusions, Erdman acknowledged he did not find explicit evidence of a coordinated conspiracy.
“I didn’t find any smoking gun where they said, `Well, we’re going to cover this up,” he said.
Lewis Kamb is an investigative reporter at U.S. Right to Know. He was the first national FOIA Reporter for NBC News and spent nearly a decade reporting for the Seattle Times, where he was part of the reporting team awarded the Pulitzer Prize for exposing the failures behind the Boeing 737 MAX crashes.
