Ex-intel Officer: U.S. Had Proof of China COVID Cover-Up

(Photo by Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images)

The politicization of COVID-19 in America during the 2020 presidential election cycle ultimately led to worldwide skepticism that the intelligence was a “radioactive American political issue,” according to a report.

Trump administration Secretary of State Mike Pompeo reportedly shared evidence of a Chinese cover-up of the COVID-19 pandemic with the U.K. before former President Donald Trump left office in January 2021, but American politicization made recipients of the Five Eyes’ intelligence sharing skeptical of it, The Telegraph reported Sunday.

“We saw several pieces of information and thought that they were, frankly, gobsmacking,” a former intelligence official who worked on the report shared by Pompeo with the U.K. told the Telegraph. “They obviously pointed to the high likelihood that this was indeed a lab leak.”

Five Eyes intelligence-sharing nations convened to discuss the evidence presented that China covered up coronavirus research, including gain of function, and military activity at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology.

U.K.’s then-Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab was on the previously unreported call with Pompeo and with representatives from Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, according to The Telegraph.

Two Trump officials said Raab and the U.K. government ignored the intelligence from the outgoing Trump administration, instead accepting government scientist resistance to the lab leak evidence.

Among the evidence of a Chinese lab leak, the State Department warned of “consistent stonewalling” by China, which accused local officials of “gross corruption and ineptitude.”

Also, the intelligence included:

The first evidence that Chinese military officials worked at the WIV in the years leading up to the pandemic.
Lab staffers had fallen ill before the first cases of COVID-19 developed nearby.
Chinese scientists had been working on gain of function research.

The dismissal of the U.S. intelligence report from Pompeo led former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson to publicly argue months later in June 2021 that “the advice that we have had is that it doesn’t look as though this particular disease of zoonotic origin came from a lab,” The Telegraph reported.

“Once the thing became fundamentally political, the ability to pursue it internationally really just collapsed because no one else was interested in touching it,” one Trump official told The Telegraph. “I think [Five Eyes] were kind of annoyed by the way the issue had become treated in U.S. politics.”

The sources told The Telegraph that the U.K. government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies’ Sir Jeremy Farrar was one of the leading people to reject the lab leak intelligence report.

With the 2020 U.S. presidential election long in the rear view, the U.K. is now sharing the belief COVID-19 originated in the WIV, according to the Telegraph.

That January 2021 call was held on an “open line” in an effort to allow Chinese intelligence to pick up the fact the Five Eyes intelligence community had the goods on a China cover-up, the sources told The Telegraph.

“We did that deliberately,” a State Department source said. “We wanted to put pressure on the bad guys.”