Feds’ botched monkey probe gives China research edge, DOJ hiding evidence: lawmakers, watchdog
- September 17, 2024
Greg Piper, Just the News
The National Institutes of Health isn’t the only federal agency facilitating a hostile nation’s vaccine development, but Americans may be surprised to learn the identity of another.
Prodded by animal rights activists, the Interior Department’s U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service went rogue in an ongoing, five-year investigation of illegal wildlife exports, with little to show for it except improving China’s geopolitical position in medical research after U.S. taxpayer dollars funded Chinese research that may have unleashed SARS-CoV-2 on the world.
That’s the narrative peddled by House Natural Resources Committee Republicans, who last week held an oversight hearing on USFWS’s “Operation Long Tail Liberation,” and watchdog group Protect the Public’s Trust, which filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Justice Department on Friday for allegedly stonewalling and disingenuously denying its related requests.
DOJ “incredibly” claimed that PPT was asking for records “on” a lawyer when the watchdog sought DOJ communications “to and from” that person, the watchdog said in a press release.
“This is the same sort of absurd assertion” the FBI “unsuccessfully attempted to employ to deny PPT records” on the DOJ’s component’s involvement in social media censorship as suggested by the Twitter Files, but the bureau “eventually relented” and agreed to start producing documents in that case, PPT said.
“In the aftermath of COVID-19, it’s hard to imagine a U.S. government agency handing our medical research capabilities directly to China,” said PPT Director Michael Chamberlain, who was special assistant to former President Trump’s Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.
He blasted the feds for a what he considered a “ridiculous, legally dubious cloak and dagger operation on foreign soil using a paid informant,” which spurned coordination with other federal agencies, records of which are being improperly hidden from the public. USFWS gave taxpayers a single prosecution and acquittal of a “minor Cambodian forestry official.”