CIA Director Ratcliffe: Agency Now Evaluating If China Intentionally Started Pandemic

CIA Director John Ratcliffe said during an interview over the weekend that the world’s leading intelligence agency was now investigating whether the COVID-19 pandemic was an accident or if it was intentional.

Ratcliffe made the remarks during a Sunday interview on “Sunday Morning Futures” while discussing his decision to release the findings from a new assessment that was conducted the Biden administration that concluded that the pandemic originated from a lab in Wuhan.

Ratcliffe said that the reason that he released the intelligence was because it was important for Americans to regain trust in government institutions.

“I had the opportunity on my first day to make public an assessment that actually took place in the Biden administration,” Ratcliffe said. “So it can’t be accused of being political, and it does assess, the CIA has assessed that the most likely cause of this pandemic that has wrought so much devastation around the world was because of a lab related incident in Wuhan, and so we’ll continue to investigate that moving forward.”

When asked by host Maria Bartiromo if the CIA has concluded whether or not the lab leak was “intentional or accidental,” Ratcliffe responded: “I’m going to look closely at the intelligence that we’ve gathered.”

“I think we’ll get to the point where every intelligence agency in the United States will agree with the CIA’s assessment that the most likely outcome was from from a lab in Wuhan,” he added. “And we’ll get more intelligence as time goes by, and we’ll be transparent with the American people about what that intelligence says.”

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