CIA Whistleblower Accuses Current CIA of Continuing COVID Coverup, Retaliating Against Investigators

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In explosive testimony before the Senate Homeland Security Committee Wednesday, a CIA official accused the agency of engaging in a COVID coverup well into President Trump’s second administration.

In his opening statement, James E. Erdman III alleged that the agency refused to cooperate with a DNI investigation, spied on investigators and retaliated against investigators.

Erdman testified that he was assigned to lead the Director’s Initiative Group (DIG) from March 2025 to April 2026 and investigate “COVID’s origins, anomalous health incidents, and unidentified anomalous phenomena.”

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard established the DIG task force in April 2025 to execute President Trump’s executive orders aimed at rebuilding trust and restoring transparency within the US Intelligence Community (IC).

“I am here today to discuss the COVID cover-up, the national security implications associated with the DIG’s investigative findings and CIA’s refusal to comply with lawful oversight, as well as how we remedy these problems, ” Erdman declared.

The whistleblower is a decorated officer with “decades of intelligence and national security experience,” according to Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.), the chairman of committee.

There were no Democrat members present for opening statements or to question Erdman, who testified at great risk to himself as he is currently employed at the CIA as a Senior Operations Officer.

“You’re taking personal risk, you’re serving the country, you’re not partisan, this isn’t about politics,” noted Senator Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) during the hearing. “But somehow it’s become about politics because Democrats don’t even want to hear the conversation about what obviously was a grave error that this country made.”

The whistleblower testified that IC leaders and senior analysts initially downplayed the possibility that the COVID pandemic originated as a result of a lab incident, leading to “a cover-up, wasted resources, and a failure to properly inform policymakers.”

“Public health policy would have been very different had the American public been made aware that a virus from a lab in China was going to serve as the foundation for an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) of mRNA products being mandated by the former administration,” Erdman stated.

The whistleblower testified that the IC had determined by August 2020 that the COVID-19 pandemic likely sprung from a lab leak in Wuhan, China, but they changed their initial conclusion after Dr. Anthony Fauci “injected himself” into conversations and “significantly influenced” them.

Fauci at the time was the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and the the White House chief medical adviser under then-President Donald Trump.

By the fall of 2023, the House Coronavirus Committee had determined that Fauci had played a major role in the CIA’s coverup of COVID’s origins.

“Dr. Fauci’s role in the cover-up was intentional. Dr. Fauci influenced the analytical process and findings by leveraging his position to ensure the IC consulted with a conflicted list of curated subject matter experts, public health officials and scientists,” the whistleblower asserted.

Some of these scientists, he pointed out, were members of the Biological Sciences Experts Group (BSEG), a DNI advisory body “whose members often receive considerable funding from NIAID and public health agencies.”

Some of these individuals went on to author the now infamous paper, “Proximal Origins of Sars CoV-2,” published in Nature Medicine in March 2020, the whistleblower noted.

“The BSEG scientists influence national laboratory WMD research, policy decisions, finished analysis, and other intelligence matters, creating misaligned incentives and conflicts of interest, as well as counter intelligence issues,” Erdman asserted.

“There was no oversight monitoring how this web of relationships influenced research, policy, and public health in any holistic way for over 20 years. In fact, several scientists helped Dr. Fauci rewrite definitions of gain of function in 2015 to lift a funding pause on dangerous research,” he continued.

“Still others participated in planning Event 201 in 2019. This was a coronavirus pandemic tabletop exercise curiously similar to the events that played out during the COVID19 pandemic and it was attended by Dr. Fauci and individuals with IC ties like former Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Avril Haines,” Erdman testified.

The World Health Organization, the Gates Foundation, and Johns Hopkins University conducted the Event 201 drills in New York on October 18, 2019, just two months before the first COVID-19 cases were officially reported in China. The ostensive purpose of the exercise was to practice the steps that would be taken during a coronavirus outbreak, although many people are convinced it was a “practice run” for the pandemic.

Erdman said the CIA and DNI analytic managers investigating the origin of COVID “made decisions inconsistent with the conclusions of subject matter experts and analytical tradecraft, consistently favoring the theory of zoonosis or natural origin.”

In 2023, he said, the CIA retaliated against analysts supporting the lab leak hypothesis for refusing “to agree with management’s middle of the night anonymous rewrite of the analysis which changed the assessment to a non-all judgment.”

The whistleblower stated that Fauci’s influence over the IC’s COVID origin analysis and “the witting and unwitting role some BSEG scientists and IC personnel played in the coverup exposed why this issue is of deep concern.”

He testified that the United States government’s inability to differentiate between public health and biodefense has been fertile ground for increasingly dangerous research.

Erdman said gain of function research and similar research conducted in US government-supported labs abroad “have blurred the lines between scientists, the military, the intelligence community.”

It has resulted in a deliberately opaque and excessively redundant biodefense research policy and financial infrastructure seemingly intended to escalate bureaucratic bloat. This is a national security crisis caused by the inability to provide real oversight. The systematic failures associated with muddled boundaries between biodefense and public health and an overly complex infrastructure have been exacerbated by documented efforts to circumvent oversight.

The CIA, according to Erdman, did not comply with lawful oversight during the DIG’s investigation into the events that transpired between 2022 and 2023, significantly impacting DNI Gabbard’s  implementation of several of President Trump’s executive orders.

“The CIA refused to provide information necessary to understand why analytical standards at the CIA were violated,” he said. “The CIA illegally monitored the computer and phone usage of DIG personnel, their investigations, and contact with whistleblowers.”

According to Erdman:

• These Americans were spied upon illegally while executing duties directed by the president and under the authority of the Director National Intelligence.

• One CIA contractor assisting with the DIG investigation was fired by the CIA one day after meeting with the DIG.

• When the DIG ceased operations, the CIA also took back 40 boxes of JFK files and MK Ultra files being processed for declassification by DNI Gabbard.

He warned that legislative and executive branches would “continue to be misinformed” if this type of behavior was not addressed.

In a statement to Fox News, the CIA accused the Republican-led committee of “acting in bad faith” by having Erdman testify, Wednesday.

“The Committee acted in bad faith by subpoenaing an Agency officer for testimony today without notifying CIA, despite having already obtained closed-door testimony from the individual previously. The witness testifying today is not appearing as a whistleblower in pursuit of the truth, but instead in response to the subpoena issued by Chairman Paul.

This proceeding amounts to nothing more than dishonest political theater masquerading as a congressional hearing. As the CIA has already assessed, COVID-19 most likely originated from a lab leak, and efforts to undermine that conclusion are disingenuous,” said Liz Lyons, CIA Director of Public Affairs.

The current CIA Director is former Republican congressman John Ratcliffe. He is the first person to have served as both DNI (under Trump from 2020 to 2021) and as CIA Director.