Joe Biden's team shut down a State Department investigation into the Wuhan laboratory as a source of the COVID-19 outbreak, according to a new report on Tuesday night.
Last fall, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo lead an investigation to answer whether China's biological weapons program may have played a role in the pandemic, sources told CNN on Tuesday.
But the probe was met with internal opposition by those concerned it was part of political effort by the Trump administration to blame China for the virus.
And when Biden's team was briefed on the investigation's findings in February and March, they decided to shut it down amid concerns about the legitimacy of the evidence, sources say.
'The way they did their work was suspicious as hell,' said one former State Department official of the probe.
The revelations will lead to uncomfortable allegations for Biden that his team politicized the public health effort, and harmed the nation by shutting down a useful inquiry begun by his predecessor.
The theory of the virus coming from a Wuhan lab had been promoted heavily by Donald Trump, who blamed China for unleashing COVID-19 on the world. Critics said that Trump was blaming China to distract from his own mishandling of the pandemic.
Yet now the idea that the virus came from a Chinese lab is gaining mainstream support, with leading scientists who previously expressed skepticism - such as Anthony Fauci - now saying it is plausible.
Trump on Tuesday night told Newsmax he's always believed the virus stemmed from a Wuhan research facility - and felt vindicated that scientific opinion and the mainstream media was finally coming round to his point of view.
A team working for Joe Biden, (right, on the White House lawn on Tuesday) shut down the inquiry after being briefed about it in February and March. U.S. former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (left in April with members of the Republican Study Committee) began the investigation in fall
Donald Trump, speaking to Newsmax on Tuesday night, said he was vindicated
Trump on Tuesday night said he stood by the Wuhan theory, and still felt it was most likely
'I said it right at the beginning, and that's where it came from,' he said.
'I think it was obvious to smart people. That's where it came from. I have no doubt about it. I had no doubt about it. I was criticized by the press.'
Trump said that he remained confident his theory about the origins of the virus was correct.
'People didn't want to say China. Usually they blame it on Russia,' he told Newsmax.
'I said right at the beginning it came out of Wuhan. And that's where all the deaths were also, by the way, when we first heard about this, there were body bags, dead people laying all over Wuhan province, and that's where it happened to be located.
'To me it was very obvious. I said it very strongly and I was criticized and now people are agreeing with me, so that's okay.'
He said he felt the media was at long last beginning to come round to his point of view.
'Now the shameful corporate media is starting to come around to recognize that perhaps that is the origin, in fact, of the China virus,' he said.
Biden talks to the media before taking off in Marine One on the Ellipse at the White House in Washington, DC, USA, 25 May
Biden was flying to Delaware Tuesday night to attend the wake of a longtime staff member Norma Long, who worked on Biden’s campaigns and in his U.S. Senate office, and died May 17 from complications related to leukemia aged 75
Biden returned back to Washington DC a few hours later following the service.
After deboarding Marine One, Biden walks on the ellipse at the White House in Washington, DC
'When it comes to China, the more we learn about their malfeasance regarding the virus and what they knew very early on - and lied to the world about it - is important for the United States.'
He said China should be punished for their lack of transparency, and for failing to cooperate with international organizations like the World Health Organizations - whose investigators were not given full access.
Trump urged Biden to take a tough line on China.
'We have to be stronger than what we are right now,' he said.
'What's going on is just very unfortunate.'
In May 2020, Pompeo, following Trump's lead, said there was 'enormous evidence' and a 'significant amount of evidence' to support the claim that the virus escaped from a lab.
His allies convened an independent panel of scientists to probe the theory and in January they held a three hour meeting to discuss the data.
They found that there were significant flaws with the research, and were concerned about methodology.
'Our scientific consulting process involved dissenting perspectives on purpose,' said one source involved in the project.
'It was a meeting with deliberative disagreement.'
David Feith, a former senior State Department official who was briefed on the efforts, said Pompeo's was the only investigation taking the theory seriously.
'People in the US government were working on the question of where COVID-19 came from, but there was no other effort that we knew of that took the lab leak possibility seriously enough to focus on digging into certain aspects, questions and uncertainties,' he said.
Donald Trump was spotted at Trump Tower in New York City on Tuesday after he spent one day at his NY residence flanked by a mass of Secret Service and NYPD
Trump and his cavalcade appears to have returned to his New Jersey Bedminster home
Others were more critical of the efforts.
The former State Department official who was familiar with the investigation was suspicious of its secrecy.
'They basically conducted it in secret, cutting out the State Department's technical experts and the Intelligence Community, and then trying to brief certain senior officials in the interagency on their 'tentative conclusions' even before they'd let the department leaders they worked for know an investigation was underway at all.
'It smelled like they were just fishing to justify pre-determined conclusions and cut out experts who could critique their 'science'.
'The reason for all this became clear when real scientists finally got a chance to see their analysis, and [the inquiry's] 'statistical' case fell apart.'
Senior officials in the State Department did not know of the existence of the inquiry until it was well advanced.
After the January session, Chris Ford, who was at the time Assistant Secretary, sent a memo to a handful of department officials, including top leadership, urging caution about the group's findings.
Ford called aspects of the analysis 'gravely flawed' and urged officials 'against suggesting that there is anything inherently suspicious - and suggestive of biological warfare activity - about People's Liberation Army involvement at WIV on classified projects.'
Eventually, the probe was shut down after Biden officials were briefed on the findings earlier this year.
A source told CNN that the investigation was shut down because the Biden team had doubts about the 'legitimacy of the findings'.
Those involved told CNN the questioning of their evidence was unfair and unwarranted, and insisted they had been objective.
A State Department spokesperson confirmed work on the inquiry had stopped, saying: 'Even though this discrete project has concluded, the State Department continues to work with the interagency to look into the COVID origins issue.'
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