Hush, nobody goes to prison

A US Senate hearing discovers the rich and powerful are above the law

“And the wicked witch was caught, and she went to prison for a very, very long time. That’s because crime doesn’t pay and nobody is above the law, not the rich, not the powerful, not even witches. Now, go to sleep, children . . .”

The Thompson children slept soundly, comforted by the thought that the world was a just and fair place. And later that night, the Thompson grownups also slept well, confident that everyone who had done wrong was in prison.

The Thompsons didn’t work for the US’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). If they had, they would have suffered nights of restless sleep, knowing that the wicked were never punished; their power or money, or both, protected them.

Oh, sure, the authorities would throw the occasional British prince to the wolves as a token gesture to make the Thompsons, and everyone else, believe the rule of law is still supreme. But it’s not.

CIA whistleblower James E. Erdman III, a senior operations officer, confessed as much to a recent US Senate Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs hearing when he revealed a massive nationwide cover-up during the Covid pandemic.

“America’s doctor” Anthony Fauci was at the heart of it, Erdman stated, and he intentionally misled everyone about the true origin of the Covid-19 virus. A small cadre of scientists, the CIA and sections of other intelligence groups supported Fauci in his claims that the virus had natural origins—and yet they knew it had escaped from a Wuhan lab where gain-of-function research, funded by US agencies, was taking place.

Erdman said that the cover-up continues today and that CIA whistleblowers have faced retaliation from the agency. He confirmed that there is still resistance within the CIA to comply with legislation declassifying all documents related to Covid’s origins.

Fauci spoke with interagency investigators on several occasions in 2020 and 2021, when the CIA was already strongly considering that the virus may have leaked from a lab, Erdman said. Investigators wanted to speak with Fauci, who provided them with a “curated list of subject matter experts,” Erdman said.

However, the list of experts “coincidentally” mirrored the list of co-authors of a key 2020 Nature Medicine paper stating that “SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.”1 Fauci and other public health officials and media figures later used the paper to refute the lab-leak theory and discredit its proponents as “conspiracy theorists.” This was the genesis of a “narrative that was being generated” by Fauci, Erdman said.

Last year, the Trump administration launched an investigation to determine whether Fauci and others had influenced the paper’s conclusions in exchange for funding.

Erdman testified that in August 2021, Fauci’s intervention helped lead the CIA to adopt a neutral stance on the origin of Covid-19 rather than supporting the lab-leak theory.

“It was significantly influenced by Anthony Fauci injecting himself into the IC [intelligence community]. . . . We have documentation that shows that . . . the CIA was considering calling this a lab leak [as late as] August 12, 2021. And then, that changed on August 17, 2021,” he told the hearing. Less than a week after the turnabout, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) fully licensed Pfizer’s mRNA Comirnaty vaccine.

Erdman said that while he has not found “smoking gun” documentation of Fauci or other officials openly discussing a cover-up, there was a “pervasive undercurrent” indicating this in much of the documentation he’s seen.

“From the outset of the pandemic, Dr Fauci shaped the conclusions,” said Rand Paul, who chaired the hearing. “Dozens of times, he referred to the idea that the pandemic originating in the lab was a conspiracy.”

Sen. Josh Hawley, who was at the hearing, said that after Congress unanimously passed a bill he sponsored in 2023 that required the government to release documentation on Covid’s origins, the government “deliberately” withheld most documents. Rather than thousands of pages of documents as requested, Congress received five pages, which were partially redacted. “If that isn’t a cover-up, I don’t know what is,” Hawley said.

Sleep tight, children.

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