After the House and Senate voted unanimously to release intelligence related to the origins of Covid-19, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner said the Biden administration had no no excuse not to allow full declassification.
“There will be no damage to the sources or the means and methods of the intelligence community for the release of this Covid-19 material,” Turner insisted in an interview with DailyMail.com.
“Congress having passed this with strong bipartisan support gives the President the support needed to be able to take action to declassify this information.”
The declassification bill came after the Department of Energy revealed with low confidence that Covid-19 most likely leaked from a lab and the FBI concluded the same with moderate confidence.
President Biden has not indicated he will veto the law, so it should become law, requiring the director of national intelligence to declassify the original Covid-19 results within 90 days and return a report. unclassified in Congress.
The bill specifically requests details about the coronavirus and gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and information about researchers who fell ill in the fall of 2019, before the virus was known. in the world.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner said the Biden administration had no excuse for not allowing the full declassification.
Questions remain over whether Covid-19 originated in Wuhan lab
It directs the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) to only redact information if necessary to protect sources and methods.
That could be interpreted loosely, though Turner says that based on what he’s seen in classified contexts, he doesn’t think it should be. “The administration may delete some information, but no information should be deleted.”
“Redacting information about how you got it is different from redacting information. There is nothing in this information that reveals the source,” Turner added.
“Findings and information available to the intelligence community should be made public.”
“There is no need to protect China,” he added.
Republicans have alleged that Dr. Anthony Fauci, longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was working to fund the Wuhan lab and gain-of-function research and was therefore incentivized to steer the public toward the natural origin.
“Clearly the statements made by Fauci have been proven to be false,” Turner said. “Last week he said that even though it was a lab leak, it was still natural in origin, which is completely unsupported by any of the information the intelligence committee has reviewed. and who would have been at his disposal.”
On Saturday, Fauci suggested on CNN that if the virus was found in nature, then studied in the lab and dumped out of the lab, it would still be considered “naturally occurring.”
“A lab leak could be that someone was out in the wild, possibly looking for different types of bat viruses, got infected, walked into a lab and was studied in a lab, then walked out of the lab. But if that’s the definition of a lab leak, then it’s still a natural occurrence,’ Fauci said.
“I don’t understand why he keeps making these statements,” Turner said.
“That’s why it’s important that this information becomes public so that we don’t have to deal with competing statements from people who have seen the information.” The American people are smart – they have to be able to read the information themselves.
Former CDC director Robert Redfield told a hearing on the origins of Covid last week: “I don’t think the answers will come from the scientific community.” I think it’s going to come from the intelligence community.
Redfield said there was evidence of the virus as early as September 2019 and pointed to three now declassified ‘highly irregular’ findings pointing to the lab leak theory – he said researchers had suppressed early Covid-19 footage, changed the command and control of the Wuhan Institute of Virology from civilian to military and allowed a contractor to redo the ventilation in the lab, which Redfield called “really eye-opening”.
Researchers work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology
On Saturday, Fauci suggested on CNN that if the virus was found in nature, then studied in the lab and dumped out of the lab, it would still be considered “naturally occurring.”
Turner urges Americans not to use TikTok as they ‘give up their data and information to China’
In the wide-ranging interview, Turner also spoke about Chinese surveillance on TikTok.
“People shouldn’t be using TikTok – they’re handing over their data and information to China, which is part of the surveillance society they’ve also subjected their people to. It is part of their authoritarian control over their citizens.
Several bipartisan bills are floating around the House and Senate that would ban or expand President Biden’s power to ban the Chinese video platform.
We still don’t know enough about classified documents, says Turner
Turner also spoke about the classified briefing the so-called Gang of Eight, top intelligence committee members and House and Senate leaders, received on classified documents found in the personal residences of President Trump, Biden and of Vice President Mike Pence.
“They didn’t provide us with any information about the particular documents that were recovered,” he said of the briefing.
“With the permission we have … we should have absolute access to be able to review them and determine for ourselves what happened and the risk, if any.”
After the Gang of Eight briefing, Turner was told by the National Archives that as many as 84 members of Congress and other senior officials had misplaced sensitive documents since 2009.
Classified documents were found intermingled with collections of documents donated to libraries, universities and museums.
Turner said he has been briefed on every presidential administration since Ronald Reagan had problems with the mishandling of classified documents.
“It’s a problem and we clearly have to solve it.”
“I’m also concerned that all of these documents are being packaged up and sent to the archivist when they should probably be going back to the agencies they came from,” Turner added.
The Presidential Archives Act requires incumbent presidents to turn over their official documents, including classified documents, to the National Archives. “If there’s a classified document that gets to the CIA, maybe once it’s finished it should go back to the CIA.”
The FBI is embarking on a ‘culture of abuse of an invasion of individuals’ privacy’
Last week, GOP Rep. Darin Lahood, R-Ill., told an Intel hearing that he believed he was the member who was improperly searched by the FBI, according to a 2021 ODNI report.
The report says the FBI improperly searched the data of an anonymous member of Congress and local political organizations under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to see if they had ties to foreign intelligence.
Justice Department officials said the search amounted to a ‘misunderstanding’ of the law by intelligence analysts and FBI Director Chris Wray said his agency had made ‘significant’ changes to its operations monitoring since then.
Turner said he was “absolutely not” happy with the FBI’s changes.
“The FBI has granted access to FISA data that includes queries on the American people, including members of Congress, which are clearly prohibited,” he said.
‘It’s not a misunderstanding. It is a culture of abuse of an invasion of individuals’ privacy.
The Intel committee has now set up a “task force” to discuss reforms to Section 702, which is supposed to be used for targeted surveillance of non-Americans.
Section 702 will expire at the end of December unless Congress votes to extend it. The Biden administration has called for a clean renewal of the provision, but will fight an uphill battle against lawmakers who want to contain it.
