Former U.S. Ambassador to Germany Ric Grenell on Friday pushed back on a suggestion that there wasn’t intelligence available in early 2020 from the Trump administration about the COVID-19 Wuhan lab leak theory, saying the media and Washington lawmakers ignored intel because they didn’t want to give former President Donald Trump a win ''to define how COVID started.''
''If you go back to April 30, 2020, there is a statement that was issued when I was acting director of national intelligence that the entire intelligence community agreed to, and that’s a very rare thing when you can get all of the agencies to sign off on every verb and every comma. But they did and they made three very critical points and, in that statement – it’s still up on the DNI website – we said China was responsible for COVID-19.
"And the intelligence community 100 percent agreed across the board, that it either started in a Wuhan lab or in what we said animal to human transmission, which really means wet market,'' Grenell said Friday during an appearance on Newsmax TV’s ''Stinchfield.''
''We were very clear but the game in Washington was they didn’t want to pick up on that statement, they didn’t publish it, they didn’t push it out like they should have because it would have given Donald Trump a win to define how COVID started, which was his clear statement that it started in China.
''Now we have Joe Biden pretending to instruct the intelligence community to go review documents and catch up. Let me be very clear, the intelligence community every day looks at documents. They don’t need to be told to catch up or do a 90-day review. They do that review every single day. So, if one person is behind and wants a 90-day catch-up, it’s Joe Biden.''
Grenell also said current Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines should be questioned on why she hasn’t been briefing President Joe Biden.
''Why is Joe Biden confused about what we know about COVID-19? Because the intelligence community doesn’t hold anything back. They every single day evaluate and push forward. It’s just some people aren’t listening or some people are listening to The Washington Post when they have some leaker.''
Biden last week ordered a U.S. intelligence inquiry into the origins of the coronavirus after The Wall Street Journal said three researchers from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick enough in November 2019 that they sought hospital care. The first officially documented case of a COVID-19 infection was in early December.
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Solange Reyner ✉
Solange Reyner is a writer and editor for Newsmax. She has more than 15 years in the journalism industry reporting and covering news, sports and politics.
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