A decorated CIA officer testified before the U.S. Senate on Wednesday that Dr. Anthony Fauci deliberately manipulated intelligence community analyses on COVID-19’s origins, steering federal investigators away from the lab leak theory and toward a predetermined conclusion of natural origin. The fix was in from the beginning: Fauci hand-picked the experts, shaped the process, and leveraged a network of grant-dependent researchers to make sure the intelligence community reached the answer he wanted. The hearing confirmed what millions of Americans long suspected: The government lied, and it knew it was lying.
CIA special operations officer James Erdman III, a 13-year Agency veteran, appeared publicly for the first time before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee under a subpoena his own agency tried to block. No Democrats participated — not one. Every Democrat on the committee chose to skip a public hearing about a government cover-up that cost more than a million American lives. Make of that what you will. The hearing was chaired by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY).
“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, public health officials and scientists.”
Fauci’s method was to hand-pick the experts the intelligence community would consult: scientists predisposed to reject the lab leak theory, including authors of the now-infamous 2020 “Proximal Origin” paper. Those authors initially believed the virus came from a Wuhan lab, changed their minds after a Zoom call with Fauci and NIH leadership, and at least one received a $9 million grant from Fauci’s agency shortly after reversing his position.
CIA analysts reached the same conclusion repeatedly between 2021 and 2023: a lab leak was the most likely origin. Those findings never reached Congress or the public. Erdman rejected reports of direct bribes but said the outcome was arguably worse: “Six of the seven technical experts say, ‘Yep, we still think it’s a lab leak.’ And they were sticking to their guns. Management changed the analytic line.”
That management capitulation didn’t happen in a vacuum. It happened because the network was already in place, and the people running the investigation were answerable to the same institutional circles that built it.
See Also: New NIH Letter Again Confirms That Fauci Lied, Funding Went To Wuhan Lab; Cancels Funding of Grant
Wuhan Lab Funder Daszak Served as Facebook Fact-Checker and on WHO Investigation Team
The structural conflict ran deep, and it didn’t start with Fauci alone. Fauci’s agency funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and Fauci was then invited into classified deliberations to assess whether that research caused the pandemic. Researcher Ralph Baric collaborated with Wuhan’s Dr. Zhengli Shi to engineer gain-of-function coronaviruses, then sat on the Biological Sciences Experts Group advising the intelligence community on COVID’s origins. Peter Daszak received hundreds of millions in U.S. government funding, worked with Shi on the same experiments, and was dispatched to China with the WHO to investigate the outbreak he may have helped cause. This is the network. The same people who funded the research, ran the research, and partnered with Chinese Communist Party-linked scientists were then handed the keys to the investigation. That isn’t independent expertise — it’s a closed loop, and it was built that way.
“It was not until after the 2024 election that the outgoing Biden Administration directed the CIA to issue an assessment — not because of new intelligence, but so officials could walk out the door claiming there was nothing left to find,” Paul said. “That is not analysis. That is a cleanup operation.”
The CIA’s response was to attack the process rather than the evidence — calling the hearing “dishonest political theater” and dismissing Erdman as a subpoena witness rather than a truth-teller. It was a classic bureaucratic deflection: Impugn the messenger, ignore the message, and hope nobody reads past the first paragraph. It didn’t work. The Agency’s own statement contained the line that blew up the whole attack: “As the CIA has already assessed, COVID-19 most likely originated from a lab leak.” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) read it aloud and demanded a public apology from CIA Director John Ratcliffe. He didn’t get one — but the contradiction was already on the record, in the CIA’s own words.
Read More: GOP-CIA Showdown Over COVID Whistleblower As Dems Go Ghost
Erdman further testified that the CIA is withholding up to 2,000 pages of classified COVID origins material in violation of a 2023 law requiring disclosure — and that whistleblowers conducting the review were illegally surveilled by the very agency they were investigating.
More than a million Americans died. Children lost years of education. Businesses were destroyed. Vaccine mandates were imposed under emergency authorities built, according to Wednesday’s testimony, on an origins narrative the government had reason to doubt from the start. The American people are owed the complete record — and accountability for everyone who helped hide it.
Editor’s Note: Do you enjoy RedState’s conservative reporting that takes on the radical Left and woke media? Support our work so that we can continue to bring you the truth.
Join RedState VIP and use promo code FIGHT to receive 60% off your membership.
