By Daily Caller. A congressional oversight subcommittee released the results of a two-year probe into the Covid-19 pandemic Monday, stating that the Department of Justice opened a criminal investigation related to the pandemic’s origins.
The 520-page report from the House Oversight Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, under the leadership of Republican Kentucky Rep. Brad Wenstrup, concluded that U.S.-based nonprofit, EcoHealth Alliance facilitated gain-of-function research with taxpayer dollars in Wuhan, China, preceding the outbreak of the pandemic. The oversight subcommittee also found that the DOJ has formed a criminal grand jury to investigate EcoHealth Alliance’s “pandemic-era activities.”
“EcoHealth was subject to numerous federal investigations regarding both its potential role in the COVID-19 pandemic, but also multiple accusations surrounding violated federal grant policies. The outcomes of most of these investigations are public,” the report states. “However, the Select Subcommittee discovered that DOJ was also investigating the origins of COVID-19. The specific details of the investigation are unknown but, based on documents, it appears the DOJ’s investigation involves EcoHealth’s role in the COVID-19 pandemic.”
The DOJ has refrained from commenting on its investigation into the pandemic’s origins and EcoHealth Alliance, and the report leaves open the possibility that the agency’s investigation is ongoing.
EcoHealth Alliance is a longtime partner of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and provided $600,000 in the form of National Institutes of Health subgrants to the Wuhan lab between 2014 and 2019 to study bat-based coronaviruses, the Daily Caller previously reported. The research nonprofit led by Dr. Peter Daszak misled the NIH regarding the WIV’s gain-of-function research funded in part by U.S. taxpayer dollars and failed to adequately monitor the Chinese entity’s gain-of-function experiments, according to the report. (Read more from “House Oversight Report Says Biden DOJ Opened Criminal Investigation Into COVID-19’s Origins” HERE)
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DOJ Secretly Investigated Nonprofit at Center of Wuhan COVID Lab Leak Questions, Bombshell House Report Reveals
By New York Post. The Department of Justice secretly launched a grand jury investigation into a US nonprofit that steered American taxpayer funding to the Chinese lab suspected of leaking the COVID-19 virus and causing the global pandemic, according to a bombshell report released by a House committee on Monday.
Scientific experts and former federal officials have suggested that EcoHealth Alliance’s grants to the China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) funded gain-of-function research that could have led to a lab leak — but records requests have repeatedly been blocked by the National Institutes of Health, according to the report.
The details of the apparent federal investigation of EcoHealth Alliance remain secret — and members of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, which released the 520-page report on the origins of and response to the pandemic, have declined to talk about it, citing concerns about interfering in any potential DOJ investigation.
However, internal emails and records from EcoHealth Alliance included in the report reveal that the grand jury issued subpoenas for genetic sequences of EcoHealth’s research on viruses in Wuhan, as well as for correspondence between the organization’s president, Dr. Peter Daszak, and Dr. Shi Zhengli, his collaborator and the so-called “bat lady” at the Wuhan Institute of Virology who specialized on coronaviruses.
In one intercepted email, an attorney at the firm Tarter, Krinsky and Drogin tells Daszak to “skip” any reference to the federal probe when asking for more time to comply with documents request from the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which ran its own investigation on the COVID pandemic. (Read more from “DOJ Secretly Investigated Nonprofit at Center of Wuhan COVID Lab Leak Questions, Bombshell House Report Reveals” HERE)
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