A CIA whistle-blower who testified under subpoena that Dr Anthony Fauci led a multi-agency cover-up of evidence that Covid-19 leaked from a lab is afraid the agency will retaliate against him, his attorney said at the weekend.

James E. Erdman III, a CIA senior operations officer, testified on Wednesday that “Dr Fauci’s role in the cover-up was intentional” and resulted in the Biden administration releasing an August 2021 report that was inconclusive about the virus’s origins – even though intelligence agencies by then had evidence of a lab leak.

Erdman’s attorney, Carol Thompson said Erdman is “concerned that the CIA will use bureaucratic processes and alleged secrecy requirements to undermine his testimony and obfuscate the truth.”

Thompson’s comments echo those she made to reporters after Wednesday’s hearing in the presence of Senator Rand Paul (Republic-Kentucky), who convened the hearing as part of his ongoing investigation into Covid-19’s origins.

Paul told reporters his team is continuing its review of evidence – and that more conflict-of-interest revelations are coming “next week.” He also addressed the May 11 deadline to indict Fauci for perjury for allegedly lying to Congress, saying that Fauci may still face indictment.

In May 2021, Fauci told Congress the National Institutes of Health and the agency he led, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID), never funded gain-of-function research. The five-year statute of limitations for indicting Fauci for his May 2021 testimony expired on Monday.

However, Fauci provided similar testimony in July 2021 – the deadline for indicting him for lies told during that testimony is July 2026.

“There are a lot of questions and I’ve sent several criminal referrals … on Anthony Fauci, and I hope they will be pursued,” Paul said.

Thompson, Paul and others said after Wednesday’s hearing that Erdman’s testimony showed not only that government and intelligence agencies participated in a cover-up but also that they are still withholding evidence today.

Senator Josh Hawley (Republican-Missouri), who sponsored a 2023 bill unanimously passed by Congress requiring the US government to release evidence on Covid-19’s origins, told reporters after the hearing that “deep state actors” are continuing the cover-up.

“We have, basically, a systematic effort to violate the laws of Congress, to lie to the American people, to mislead the American people, and it’s still going on,” Hawley said.

Feds for Freedom, a group of federal workers — co-founded by Erdman — who advocate for transparency and informed consent, applauded Erdman’s testimony.

The group’s president, Kevin McAfee, said in a statement shared with The Defender that Erdman “put his career on the line to demand truth and transparency. Our government desperately needs more officials with his courage and integrity.”

Investigative journalist Paul D. Thacker said the hearing provided the American public with information it did not previously have full access to.

“Paul held an excellent hearing yesterday. For some D.C. insiders, there was probably not much new that came out, but it was important information for the public,” Thacker said. He said there is likely more information to come.

“I have spoken to and reported on several people with security clearances who have stated that not all the classified material pointing to a Wuhan lab accident has been made public. The CIA director promised in his confirmation hearing to declassify that information, but this has still not happened,” Thacker said.

The Biden administration’s 2021 report concluded that the intelligence community remained “divided on the most likely origin of Covid-19.”

The report didn’t dismiss the possibility of a leak from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, but it concluded that a zoonotic – or natural – origin of the virus was “plausible.”

The report did dismiss the possibility that SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for Covid-19, was the product of gain-of-function research – which increases the virulence or transmissibility of viruses and is often used in vaccine development.

“We judge the virus was not developed as a biological weapon. Most agencies also assess with low confidence that SARS-CoV-2 probably was not genetically engineered,” the report stated.

The Washington Post reported at the time that then-Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said it might not be possible to identify “a smoking gun” that would prove one way or the other if Covid-19 leaked from a lab.

However, last year, an FBI insider told The Wall Street Journal that in August 2021, Haines briefed Biden and top aides only on evidence supporting the zoonotic theory. The FBI, which had collected evidence supporting the lab-leak theory, was excluded from this briefing.

In his testimony Wednesday, Erdman said the CIA was considering officially adopting the lab-leak hypothesis as late as August 12, 2021, but by August 17, 2021, had shifted its position to an inconclusive stance on the virus’s origins, likely due to Fauci’s influence.

Less than a week later, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) fully licensed Pfizer’s mRNA Comirnaty Covid-19 vaccine. A day after the FDA issued its approval, the US military mandated the vaccine for its service members.

Thompson said that a series of events occurred around the time that the report was published, suggesting a possible conflict of interest between the CIA and other federal and military officials. She said:

“Terry Adirim, then acting assistant secretary of defines for health affairs, signed a memo on Sept. 14, 2021, directing Department of Defence (DOD) healthcare providers to treat the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine (which was still under Emergency Use Authorization (EUA)) as interchangeable with the newly FDA-approved Comirnaty vaccine, and to use the EUA vaccine to fulfil then-Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin’s 2021 military vaccine mandate.

“Comirnaty was never made available for use in the United States during the pandemic. … After destroying the careers of thousands of service members who refused the unauthorized vaccine, Ms. Adirim was then hired by the CIA to be the director of the Centre for Global Health Services.”

In November 2021, a federal judge rejected the DOD’s claim that Comirnaty and the EUA Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccines were “interchangeable.” The order came in response to a lawsuit filed that year by service members challenging the military’s vaccine mandate.

Sayer Ji, chairman of the Global Wellness Forum and founder of GreenMedInfo, said Erdman’s testimony “was the closest thing to a public autopsy of institutional capture we’ve seen on Covid origins.”

Ji said Erdman’s testimony, which included information indicating that scientists who were involved with gain-of-function research and who received funding had ties to Fauci, also pokes serious holes in the credibility of the Biden administration’s 2021 report.

“Beyond the zoonotic tilt, the structural flaw is what Erdman exposed: the report was written under conditions where the analysts most qualified to assess the biological evidence were overruled by managers acting on input from outside virologists with direct funding relationships to the agencies whose conduct was under review,” Ji said.

In July 2021, just one month before the release of the Biden administration’s report, Fauci told the Senate – for the second time that year – which NIAID did not fund gain-of-function research, that research involving bat coronaviruses did not fit the definition of such research and that he hadn’t previously lied to Congress.

“This is a pattern that Sen. Paul has been doing now at multiple hearings, based on no reality,” Fauci testified. “He keeps talking about gain-of-function. This has been evaluated multiple times by qualified people to not fall under the gain-of-function definition. I have not lied before Congress. I have never lied, certainly not before Congress. Case closed.”

Paul told reporters that the US Department of Justice has until July to indict Fauci, based on his July 2021 testimony to Congress.

“There’s also the question of destroying records, destroying emails, encouraging others to destroy emails, which is against the law,” Paul said. “Conspiracy charges have been filed against David Morens, who was a long-time lieutenant of Anthony Fauci.”

Last month, a grand jury indicted Morens, formerly a top aide to Biden at NIAID, for attempting to shield information about Covid-19’s origins from potential Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) review by illegally using his personal email account.

Paul also questioned Biden’s pre-emptive pardon of Fauci, issued in the final minutes of the former president’s administration. He suggested the pardon’s retroactive nature, and the possibility that it was signed with an “autopen” instead of by Biden himself, calls it into question.

“We’ve never had a pardon challenged before that I know of being successful, but we’ve also never had a pardon that was given for 10 years for unspecified crimes,” Paul said. “So that really is something that I think should be questioned. The other question is whether or not you can pardon somebody if the president really never was conscious of the person who was pardoned and it was done by an autopen.”

Will new evidence lead to Fauci indictment?

Earlier this month, Justin Goodman, senior vice president of Advocacy & Public Policy at watchdog group White Coat Waste, suggested Fauci could face a perjury indictment as late as 2029, for allegedly lying to Congress in 2024 by claiming he never conducted NIH business using his personal email account.

Thacker questioned whether Fauci will ever be indicted, however, reflecting remarks he shared in an interview for The Defender’s Substack earlier this week.

“Nothing is going to happen to Fauci’s pardon, and I don’t know why we keep discussing this pointless topic,” Thacker said.

But according to Ji, “the case for indictment looks stronger” after the hearing. “Whether the U.S. Department of Justice acts depends on the pardon question, on prosecutorial will, and on whether the new evidence Erdman surfaced changes the legal calculus enough to overcome the obvious institutional resistance,” Ji said.

Legal experts previously noted that Fauci could still face state-level charges not shielded by the federal pardon. The Gateway Pundit reported today that Texas Governor Greg Abbott directed the state’s Major Crimes Division to investigate Fauci, for allegedly causing “the deaths of tens of thousands of Texans.”

For Thacker, though, the main source of federal obstruction is the CIA. Even though the agency last year concluded that Covid-19 most likely leaked from a lab, CIA officials are reportedly “not happy” with Erdman’s testimony. Erdman alleged that the CIA retaliated against internal whistle-blowers examining Covid-19’s origins.

“Some of the biggest problems with the federal government have nothing to do with either political party and carry on across administrations. One of those big problems is the CIA,” Thacker said. “All agencies hate congressional oversight.”

• A Tell Media report / By Michael Nevradakis – A senior reporter for The Defender