EXCLUSIVE: The Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic reviewed classified State Department records that members say “credibly suggest” COVID-19 originated from a “lab-related accident in Wuhan, China” and that the Chinese Communist Party “attempted to cover up the lab leak.”
Committee Chairman Brad Wenstrup sent a letter, obtained by Fox News Digital, to Secretary of State Antony Blinken Tuesday, requesting he declassify the records to “share the truth” about COVID origins with the American people.
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Wenstrup said the State Department recently produced classified documents to the select committee after the same documents had been previously released in an “unclassified and highly redacted” Freedom of Information Act production to a nonprofit group called U.S. Right to Know.
Rep. Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, leaves a meeting of the House Republican Conference at the Capitol Hill Club on Wednesday, July 26, 2023. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
The classified materials sent to the committee contain “highly pertinent information that credibly suggests COVID-19 originated from a lab-related accident in Wuhan, China,” Wenstrup wrote in the letter, which was obtained by Fox News Digital.
Wenstrup said the documents also suggest that the Chinese Communist Party “acted to prevent, and in fact obstructed, a fulsome investigation into these matters.”
The documents also suggest a “seamless relationship” between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and Chinese People’s Liberation Army, according to Wenstrup.
Security personnel stand guard outside the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan as members of the World Health Organization (WHO) team investigating the origins of the COVID-19 coronavirus make a visit to the institute in Wuhan in China’s central Hubei province on Feb. 3, 2021. (Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images)
“The American people deserve to see the information that is hidden under these redactions,” Wenstrup wrote. “We write to you today to request that you immediately take steps to declassify this information such that the American people have a more complete picture of the government’s evidence regarding the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
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Wenstrup also urged Blinken to give a staff level briefing on the records before May 14.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken. (Reuters/Evelyn Hockstein/Pool)
The State Department did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.
President Biden signed the COVID-19 Origin Act of 2023 last year, which required the government to declassify information on what may have led to the pandemic.
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The Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a declassified report in June 2023 which said the intelligence community has not come to a conclusion on whether the pandemic was spurred by a lab leak or from “natural exposure” of an infected animal — like at one of the wet markets in China.
“All agencies continue to assess that both a natural and laboratory-associated origin remain plausible hypotheses to explain the first human infection,” the report said.
Red flags flutter in front of the Great Hall of the People before the annual two sessions on March 4, 2022 in Beijing, China. The fifth session of the 13th National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) opens on March 4. (Photo by VCG/VCG via Getty Images)
FORMER INTELLIGENCE CHIEF SAYS A LAB LEAK IS THE ‘ONLY EXPLANATION’ FOR COVID
The National Intelligence Council and four other intelligence community agencies have assessed that natural contact with a wild animal was the most likely cause.
The U.S. Energy Department and the FBI have determined that COVID-19 likely emerged from a lab leak in China.
The report said the CIA and another unnamed agency haven’t come to a conclusion, “as both hypotheses rely on significant assumptions or face challenges with conflicting reporting.”
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But “almost all” of the agencies have assessed it was not “genetically engineered” and the entire intelligence community agrees that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, was “not developed as a biological weapon,” the report stated.
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