About that COVID origins report...
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This administration has quite the history of slow-walking, doesn't it?
The House and Senate unanimously passed the COVID-19 Origin Act of 2023 in March, with the law giving the Office of the Director of National Intelligence 90 days to declassify and release intelligence on the Wuhan Institute of Virology and its connections to the emergence of SARS-CoV-2. The deadline passed on Sunday without the declassification happening.
Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI), the chairman of the select committee on China who sponsored the bill in the House, told the Washington Examiner that "Congress overwhelmingly passed legislation requiring the administration to declassify all relevant intelligence around the origins of COVID-19." The congressman said, "Biden cannot continue to ignore this overwhelming bipartisan consensus" and that "Congress must use every tool at its disposal to enforce this law and ensure the president makes this information available to the public."
The law instructed Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines to “declassify any and all information relating to potential links between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the origin” of COVID-19, including intelligence on the “activities performed by the Wuhan Institute of Virology with or on behalf of the People's Liberation Army” and “coronavirus research or other related activities performed at the Wuhan Institute of Virology prior to the outbreak” of SARS-CoV-2.
The legislation also told the Biden administration to hand over any information on the “researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology who fell ill in autumn 2019.”
Biden said on March 20 that he was “pleased” to sign the measure into law, contending that “I share the Congress’s goal of releasing as much information as possible about the origin” of COVID-19.
The president said in his signing statement that his administration “will continue to review all classified information relating to COVID–19’s origins, including potential links to the Wuhan Institute of Virology” and that his team “will declassify and share as much of that information as possible, consistent with my constitutional authority to protect against the disclosure of information that would harm national security.”
The bipartisan measure allowed for “only such redactions as the Director determines necessary to protect sources and methods.”
Sens. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Mike Braun (R-IN), who led the way in passing the bill in the Senate, sent a letter to Biden last week “to urge the swift and complete implementation” of the law.
“That deadline, June 18, 2023, is fast approaching,” Hawley and Braun wrote. “Your Administration has not yet provided any indication of when the relevant material will be declassified.”
