Rand Paul pressing Jim Jordan to push FBI for COVID origin info

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) pressed House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) to push the FBI for information about the origin of COVID-19 ahead of the committee’s Wednesday hearing with FBI Director Christopher Wray.

Paul, who had previously requested meetings with the FBI’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate to discuss its investigation into the origins of COVID-19, said he was writing to “notify” Jordan that FBI leadership was refusing to meet with Congress on the topic.

“The FBI’s refusal to meet with elected representatives to discuss their work on SARS-CoV-2 is unacceptable and cannot be tolerated,” he said in the letter Tuesday. 

“FBI leadership appears to want to prevent Congress and the American people from learning additional information underlying its conclusion that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a lab incident in Wuhan,” Paul added.

“This is not all coincidental. The Biden Administration clearly has a policy against cooperation and has no interest in investigating and resolving the SARS-CoV-2 origins. That policy has clearly infected the FBI and, as a result, contributed to its politicization.”

Paul and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) initially asked the assistant director of the Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate for a meeting in April and followed up with Wray last month, after not receiving any response. The FBI director has not responded to their June letter, Paul said.

Wray said in late February that the FBI “has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan.”

“I will just make the observation that the Chinese government, it seems to me, has been doing its best to try to thwart and obfuscate the work here,” Wray also said at the time, adding, “That’s unfortunate for everybody.”

His comments came in the wake of reports that a classified Energy Department report concluded with “low confidence” that the COVID-19 pandemic most likely originated from a laboratory leak in China.

However, other U.S. agencies have been more skeptical of that theory and still believe that natural transmission from animals to humans is a more likely origin of the virus, which has killed millions around the world.