GOP House Intel chair wants COVID origins declassified

House Intelligence Committee Chair Mike Turner (R) called for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to declassify all data reviewed in the probe into the origins of the COVID-19 virus and into the possible link to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, calling a recent report released by the agency “not sufficient.”

On Friday, the ODNI released a report summarizing the findings of its research. It concluded that while some researchers at the institute were ill in 2019 with symptoms that were consistent with COVID-19, the symptoms were not necessarily diagnostic of the illness.

The report was issued in compliance with a law passed by Congress that required all information related to this probe by the ODNI to be declassified.

In an interview on CBS News’s “Face the Nation,” Turner criticized the report for summarizing the findings, rather than giving a transparent look at the data and predicted this would set up a potential battle with Congress.

“What they did is they basically went in and did a paper on what they believe about the intelligence they’ve looked at,” Turner said of the report. “We’ve asked to open the curtain and release the intelligence, and they went behind the curtain, read the stuff and came out and said, ‘Well, this is what we think about it.’”

“This is not sufficient,” Turner said. “And certainly, this is going to set up … a battle between Congress and the Director of National Intelligence to make certain that that the law – that was passed unanimously, both the Senate and the House and was signed by the president – is complied with, but also the American public get the answers they deserve.”

When moderator Margaret Brennan asked about a classified annex of the report, Turner said the very existence of the annex contradicts the essence of the law, which requires the information to be declassified by the American public.

“Actually we just got this late late Friday, so I haven’t had access to it in a classified setting, but even releasing a classified annex goes against what the law says. The law says, ‘declassified,’ not, ‘give us more classified information.’ I mean, my committee has already seen a significant amount of this intelligence. Giving my committee more intelligence doesn’t give it to the American public. And that’s what the declassification law was about.”

In the executive summary of the report, the ODNI said the classified annex was necessary to protect sources but that the findings were consistent with what was released in the report.

“A classified annex to this report includes information that was necessary to exclude from the unclassified portion of this report in order to protect sources and methods, but the information contained in the annex is consistent with the unclassified assessments contained in this report,” read the executive summary of the report, which was released Friday.

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