EMAIL · 12 July 2023
FW: Readout of contentious HPSCI COVID Origins briefing
Provenance: Forwarded 12 July 2023, 3:59 pm · encloses the original readout of 23 September 2021, 3:50 pm, addressed to Morgan Muir · 2 pages.
A 2023 forward of a candid 2021 readout written the same afternoon as a House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence briefing that went badly. The author’s account is unusually frank about the hostility encountered and about their own expectations of the fallout.
The author, with three NCPC representatives and one from OLA, briefed HPSCI on the COVID Origins assessment. After opening remarks from Rep. Schiff and Rep. Nunes, Nunes yielded his time to Rep. Wenstrup, and in the author’s words everything then went downhill.
Wenstrup had a series of open-source documents read into the record: 2005 papers on SARS as a bioterror weapon, Fauci’s 2012 statements on gain-of-function research, and Ralph Baric’s 2015 chimeric virus work.
Questions centred on the identities of the outside experts the IC had consulted. The author declined, citing IC policy and source protection — the same answer given to staffers at the pre-brief two days earlier — and describes minority members using two to three minutes of their five expressing outrage, with one saying "shame on you."
Rep. Speier felt the assessment focused too heavily on one redacted subject and wanted the IC to speak to a constituent who had been on a riverboat cruise in Wuhan in November 2019. Rep. Krishnamoorthi said the refusal made the IC look bad.
Members of both parties were surprised that FBI had reached a different conclusion from other agencies; Rep. Carson asked whether FBI was an equal and honest partner, and both briefers said yes. Repeated explanations of what "low confidence" means did not land.
The author concludes the experts question was a set-up designed to give members a reason to distance themselves from the Updated Assessment, and expects angry letters to the DNI questioning their professionalism — "and maybe that I be fired."
Item 12 of the ODNI COVID-19 document release of 18 June 2026, held complete and readable in the V.A.D.E.S. archive at DEFROST.WORLD.