Headline after headline in mainstream and quasi-mainstream press described yesterday’s testimony of alleged “whistleblower” and current senior CIA officer James Erdman III as “bombshell.”
I get it; you have to move product. In this media environment, that means sensational headlines to compete for a finite number of clicks that a non-bot human can make on any given day.
I’ve done the “BOMBSHELL,” “DESTROYED,” etc., all-caps hyperbole thing many times myself, and I’ll probably do it again.
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That’s just the name of the game.
Even so, the BOMBSHELL testimony from a CIA “whistleblower,” who oddly is still employed by the agency even while he ostensibly trashes it publicly — which ought to raise anyone’s eyebrows — was really not very bombshell at all.
Rather, it was mostly recitations of what independent journalists like me and others at PJ Media, with no thanks to legacy media or the government, and often in the face of enormous censorship, have documented for years: Anthony Fauci ran a corrupt grant-funding racket designed to control scientists dependent on government money, the intelligence community lied about what it knew about COVID origins, etc.
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The only remotely new information was that the agency management corruptly altered a 2021 and, later, a 2023 assessment that COVID likely originated from a lab.
Via The Epoch Times (emphasis added):
As early as 2020, many people within the CIA assessed that the most likely origin of COVID-19 was the high-level laboratory in Wuhan, China, where the first cases appeared in 2019, James Erdman III, a senior CIA operations officer, said in Washington in testimony to a Senate committee.
Erdman, who led an investigation into how intelligence officials handled assessments of the origin of COVID-19, said that documents obtained during the probe show that as of Aug. 12, 2021, the CIA was considering describing the origin as a lab leak. That changed five days later.
Erdman said that the CIA declined to provide his team the documents they requested that may have shed light on the change, but that it happened after Dr. Anthony Fauci, then-head of the National Institutes of Health—which provided funding for the Wuhan lab—met with intelligence community officials and provided a list of experts with whom he had a long history…
In a declassified assessment based on information through August 2021, intelligence officials said that all but one agency either did not favor an origin theory or supported the theory that COVID-19 came from nature. That agency is not believed to be the CIA…
An updated assessment released in mid-2023 stated that the CIA was unable to determine the origin of COVID-19 because both the lab and natural origin theories “rely on significant assumptions or face challenges with conflicting reporting.”
Erdman said that the CIA’s work leading up to that assessment leaned toward a lab origin, but that management undertook a “middle of the night anonymous rewrite,” which altered the conclusions to a “a non-call judgment.”
(No Democrats, it should be noted, on the Homeland Security committee could even be bothered to show up to the hearing.)
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This whole congressional hearing dog-and-pony show is so played out as to be insulting.
The only BOMBSHELL headline I’m interested in, from here until forever, is that the people who committed the largest criminal conspiracy in world history are getting perp-walked to their new home under the jail.
