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 that contained additional details and allegations. The committee released Erdman’s written statement a day after the hearing.

In the statement, Erdman wrote that he was recruited as one of the earliest members of the DIG — the Director’s Initiatives Group, a task force that DNI Tulsi Gabbard created on April 8, 2025 — because of his CIA experience and knowledge of COVID-19 origins.

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.”

In his written statement, Erdman added that changes to the draft assessment were made at 1:53 a.m., with no track-changes attributions showing who made them. The team’s senior analyst formally objected in writing, asking that the email be sent directly to the CIA’s Weapons and Counterproliferation Center front office. CIA management did that, but only after appending its own commentary, Erdman wrote. The analyste who wrote the objection later refused to participate in any further COVID analysis, citing concerns that policymakers were being misinformed. Two other team members also filed formal complaints with the CIA’s ombudsman for analytic integrity, according to Erdman’s written statement.

During the hearing, Sen. Paul noted 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 five days later, analysts’ conclusions appeared to abruptly shift course, he said. Erdman’s written statement states that no documents in the DIG’s holdings explain why the assessment changed.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.

Erdman’s written statement provided more details on those retaliation claims. He wrote that the CIA also opened formal investigations into DIG members and began contacting them to report to a separate facility, which he described as a location where polygraph interviews are conducted. He also wrote that DIG members had previously noticed third parties listening in on secure phone calls at Intelligence Community facilities, including at least one call with a whistleblower. DNI IT experts confirmed, Erdman wrote, that reproducing what occurred on those calls would have required a formal IT engineering work order, meaning someone deliberately requested a technical change to the communications infrastructure.

The written statement also disclosed that after the DIG was dissolved in January 2026, the CIA took back 40 boxes of documents that had been queued for declassification — JFK assassination files —and those records have not yet been released. The CIA also retrieved MKULTRA files that the DNI had been preparing for possible declassification, Erdman’s statement states.

The problems he described within the CIA extended beyond individual misconduct and reflected systemic failures within the agency, Erdman testified.

“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.

In his written statement, Erdman provided a detailed chronology fleshing out when and how Fauci intervened. He wrote that Fauci injected himself into the intelligence process at two key moments: first in February 2020, as the pandemic was beginning, and again in June 2021, as the IC was launching its 90-day review of all-source intelligence.

Regarding Fauci’s alleged February 2020 intervention, Erdman wrote that on Feb. 1, Fauci led a private teleconference call with NIH Director Francis Collins and scientists including Jeremy Farrar, Edward Holmes, Kristian Andersen, Robert Garry and Andrew Rambaut. Two days later, on Feb. 3, Fauci participated in a National Academy of Sciences call that also included Andersen, prominent University of North Carolina virologist Ralph Baric, the FBI and ODNI. During that call, Baric’s research ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, including sharing humanized mice with the Wuhan researchers, were discussed, but the lab leak hypothesis was broadly dismissed, Erdman wrote.

Erdman also wrote that on June 4, 2021, Fauci also particiatped in an interagency meeting, during which he provided specific guidance on the IC’s outreach efforts to the scientific community. The NIC officer leading the 90-day review proceeded to implement Fauci’s guidance, Erdman wrote. According to one email exchange Erdman described, a senior DNI official questioned whether it was appropirate to solicit Fauci’s recommendations on COVID origins. The NIC officer responded that Fauci should be considered a subject-matter expert rather than a public health official. Erdman noted that characterization “in direct contrast” to Fauci’s June 3, 2024 congressional testimony, during which Fauci noted he was “not an evolutionary virologist” and “left the issue of origin of the virus to the experts.”

Erdman’s written tesimony also described a specific incident involving Baric. He wrote that on Jan. 28, 2020, Baric provided a presentation to the National Counterproliferation and Biosecurity Center that included, on page 22, a discussion of the possibility of a lab leak. Following discussion with NCBC personnel, Baric provided a revised presentation on January 30 that stripped out the lab-leak discussion.

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 Baric, a federally-funded collaborator on coronavirus research with scientists at the WIV.

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.

In his written statement, Erdman went further, providing new details about the BSEG’s origin and scope. He wrote that after the 9-11 terrorist attacks, the intelligence community recruited scientists and granted them security clearances as part of the BSEG. The IC initially intended to use them only for analysis of complex topics, but their role quickly expanded, Erdman wrote.

Since 2006, the BSEG scientists consulted part-time on biodefense issues for the IC while simultaneously conducting government-funded research, holding academic positions, maintaining roles at public health instiutions and serving as members of the National Academy of Sciences, Erdman wrote. They received funding from NIAID and other agencies for vaccine research, USAID’s virus-hunting PREDICT project, the cooperative threat reduction program and even worked with Chinese scientists on coronavirus and other pathogen studies. Erdman wrote that ther was no oversight monitoring how this web of relationships influenced research, policy and public health for over 20 years.

He added another particularly striking detail: that several of the same IC-affliated scientists helped Fauci rewrite the definition of “gain-of-function” research in 2015 to lift a funding pause on dangerous research. Still others participated in planning Event 201 in 2019 — a coronavirus pandemic tabletop exercise that Erdman noted was curiously similar to the actual events of the COVID-19 pandemic. The event was also attended by Fauci and individual swith IC ties, including former DNI Avril Haines, he wrote.

In his written statement, Erdman also described how a May 2020 Department of Energy national laboratory report — which found that all prerequisite conditions for a lab leak were present at the Wuhan lab — was widely distributed during interagency coordination but was not included in any of the IC’s intelligence products published in 2020. The report was eventually published in February 2021 with only one change and was included only in the annex of the classified 2021 90-day study product.

Erdman’s written statement also disclosed that the NIC’s role in the 90-day study resulted in what he called a fundamental failure of its core function: rather than marshaling intelligence agencies to produce a consolidated assessment for policymakers, the NIC simply listed each agency’s individual stance. For its own position, the NIC took a vote among team members, Erdman added. Five of six NIC officials responsible for COVID origins assessed it to be natural origin, with no other documentation found to explain how they reached that conclusion beyond the vote count itself, the written statement states.

When asked whether intelligence officials were deliberately trying to protect China, Erdman testified that 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.

Erdman’s written statement alleges that ODNI under Haines’ direction did not conduct a serious review or declassification effort for documents covered by the COVID Origins Act, and that the intelligence community simiply ignored turning over thousands of pages of material that he believed fell under the law.

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.

Erdman’s written statement referenced additional intelligence-community analyses that he said were downplayed or ignored. Among them was a May 2020 Department of Energy national laboratory report concluding that all prerequisite conditions for a lab leak were present at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Erdman wrote that the report circulated widely during interagency discussions but was excluded from intelligence-community products issued in 2020.

Erdman further alleged in his written testimony that, during a classified briefing for President Biden following the 2021 intelligence-community review, one of the CIA’s senior scientific analysts told the president that all five of the agency’s principal scientific indicators favored a laboratory-origin explanation for the pandemic.

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.

(UPDATE: This story was updated on May 15 to include details from Erdman’s written statement, which was released after publication of its initial version.)

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.