During this week’s broadcast of FNC’s “Sunday Morning Futures,” CIA director John Ratcliffe discussed his early findings about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic in length.
Earlier reporting showed the CIA had found the pandemic most likely started from a laboratory leak in Wuhan, China.
While Ratcliffe said he was still working to offer President Donald Trump the best intelligence for his approach to establishing a U.S. policy response to China for the COVID-19 leak, he had yet to determine if the leak was intentional.
Partial transcript as follows:
BARTIROMO: And you right out of the gate come out with this new intelligence that the CIA has concluded the deadly COVID-19 pandemic arose likely from the leak out of a laboratory in Wuhan, as our audience expected. Tell me the significance of the CIA now confirming this, sir.
RATCLIFFE: Well, it’s one of the things President Trump and I talked about.
Part of what we have to do is, we have to restore Americans’ trust in our own institutions, like the intelligence community and law enforcement, and that includes the CIA. And one of the things that the president stressed, that the purpose of the CIA is to protect Americans, to keep us safe from foreign threats and foreign adversaries.
But we also need to be truthful with Americans. And he has stressed to me and others that these aren’t mutually exclusive missions. We can do both. And so, in the case of the CIA, which is the best foreign intelligence service in the world, after five years to not have a public assessment, to be honest with the American people about where the likely source of a pandemic that killed millions around the world, including a million Americans, and really impacted all 345 million Americans in some way.
People lost jobs. They lost houses. They lost their health. They lost their businesses, all of that. And so I had the opportunity on my first day to make public an assessment that actually took place in the Biden administration. So it can’t be accused of being political.
And it does assess, the CIA has assessed that the most likely cause of this pandemic that has wrought so much devastation around the world was because of a lab-related incident in Wuhan. And so we will continue to investigate that moving forward.
But I think it was important for the American people to see an institution like the CIA get off the sidelines and be truthful about what our intelligence shows, at the same time of protecting us from adversaries like China if they caused or contributed to this.
BARTIROMO: So what will there be? Will there be a response to communist China on this? What will be the result of this?
And, also, why was it important for President Trump to revoke the security clearance of the former CIA Director John Brennan and the 51 spies who misled us?
RATCLIFFE: Well, all this goes hand in hand, Maria.
So we talk about what President Trump wants is he says, lead with integrity and get the politics out of the intelligence community. So you talk about revoking security clearances. We talk about the 51 former intelligence officials.
Remember that there’s sworn testimony under oath from the author of that letter that the intent behind that was to influence the election in favor of then-candidate Biden, to improperly influence an election with something that everyone knows wasn’t true, that Hunter Biden’s laptop was real…
BARTIROMO: Right.
RATCLIFFE: … that it wasn’t Russian disinformation. So this was all about accountability and deterrence and consequences.
When former officials use the imprimatur of I.C. authority to misrepresent to the American people, there should be consequences. And so this was not retributive in any way. It was about making sure that people think about this, myself included, going forward, that we don’t mix politics and intelligence.
And so consequences and establishing deterrence, the COVID origins assessment, making that public, President Trump needs to have the very best intelligence so that, when he’s negotiating with President Xi and other adversaries, he’s able to confront them with the things that we know that our intelligence tells us about what our adversaries have done to us.
So now that it’s out there, he will be able to use that, to leverage that, to have honest discussions, to put America’s — our national security posture in a better position than it’s been for the last four years.
BARTIROMO: And, Director, have you identified or concluded that that lab leak was intentional or accidental?
RATCLIFFE: Well, we’re going to continue to look at — I have been on the job a couple of days now, and I’m going to look closely at the intelligence that we have gathered.
Maria, I think we will get to the point where every intelligence agency in the United States will agree with the CIA’s assessment that the most likely outcome was from a lab in Wuhan. And we will get more intelligence as time goes by. And we will be transparent with the American people about what that intelligence says.
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