An offshoot of the conservative Heritage Foundation is suing the Central Intelligence Agency, accusing it of withholding records detailing payoffs to analysts to bury findings that a lab leak was the most likely explanation for the COVID-19 pandemic.
The think tank’s Oversight Project filed a federal lawsuit against the CIA Dec. 22, alleging the agency did not comply with its Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request about analysts who allegedly “received monetary incentives to change their position on the origins of the virus,” according to a copy of the complaint first reported Tuesday by the Daily Caller.
Heritage Foundation Oversight Project’s complaint against the CIA
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The suit in Washington, DC, federal court asks for “a preliminary and permanent injunction compelling” the CIA to expedite the production of records requested by Heritage within 20 days or “by such other date as the Court deems appropriate.”
“The Biden Administration has refused to be transparent with Congress and the American people over the origins of COVID-19,” said Kyle Brosnan, chief counsel for the Oversight Project.
“A CIA whistleblower has made serious allegations that the agency bought off employees of the agency to further obstruct efforts to get to the truth of the virus’s origins. This obstruction cannot stand and we’re fighting in federal court to get to the bottom of this.”
The think tank’s Oversight Project filed a federal lawsuit on Friday against the CIA, alleging the agency did not comply with its September Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.Future Publishing via Getty Images
A senior-level CIA agent told House Republican committee chairmen in September that the agency offered payments to six analysts tasked with determining the origins of SARS-CoV-2 if they said that the virus jumped from animals to humans.
The Sept. 12 letter from Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) and Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Mike Turner (R-Ohio) to CIA Director William Burns also demanded documentation and communications about the payments.
“According to the whistleblower, at the end of its review, six of the seven members of the Team believed the intelligence and science were sufficient to make a low confidence assessment that COVID-19 originated from a laboratory in Wuhan, China,” the House panel chairmen wrote to Burns.
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