James Erdman, a career CIA operations officer who spent much of the last year on joint assignment for the Director of National Intelligence Director Initiatives Group (DNI DIG), testified before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs on Wednesday, telling committee members Fauci “influenced the analytical process and findings by leveraging his position to ensure the [intelligence community] consulted with a conflicted list of curated subject matter experts, public health officials, and scientists.”
He further said the CIA and DNI analytic managers responsible for examining the origin of Covid “made decisions inconsistent with the conclusions of subject matter experts and analytical tradecraft, consistently favoring the theory of zoonosis or natural origin.”
And when the CIA conducted a Covid relook in 2022 and 2023, the CIA “retaliated against analysts supporting the lab-leak hypothesis,” Erdman says, particularly against those who refused to agree with “management’s middle of the night anonymous rewrite of the analysis, which changed the assessment to a non-call judgment.”
The CIA then failed to comply with the DNI DIG’s oversight investigation, refusing to provide necessary information for investigators to understand why analytical standards at the CIA were violated. The CIA also illegally spied on the computer and phones belonging to DIG personnel, along with their investigations and contact with whistleblowers, Erdman alleges.
“These were Americans being spied upon illegally while executing duties directed by the president and under the authority of the director of national intelligence,” he said.
The alleged retaliation led to the firing of one CIA contractor who assisted with the DIG’s investigation; the contractor was fired by the CIA one day after meeting with the DIG.
In 2021, as the intelligence community worked to make an assessment as to whether Covid-19 began with a lab-leak or via natural origins, Fauci offered investigators a list of subject matter experts to contact. Erdman and others would later discover that the list included experts who had been in Fauci’s orbit for more than 20 years and who had authored a scientific paper that Fauci
infamously commissioned to debunk the hypothesis that Covid escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan, China.
Some of the scientists whom Fauci directed the intelligence committee to contact were part of the Biological Sciences Experts Group (BSEG), an Office of Director of National Intelligence advisory body, whose members “often receive considerable funding from NIAID and public health agencies,” according to Erdman, who called attention to the “overly complex” infrastructure in the public health community that led to conflicts of interest and prevented proper oversight.
