by Keith Griffith at The Daily Mail
Questions are mounting about whether officials intentionally suppressed a top secret government report concluding COVID-19 could have originated in a lab leak, after it emerged that the study took five months to reach the State Department.
Lawrence Livermore National Lab’s secretive ‘Z Division’ intelligence unit produced the report on May 27, 2020, but it did not reach the State Department until last October, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.
Dr. David J. Rakestraw, a senior science adviser who formerly ran LLNL’s biodefense programs and coordinated the lab’s COVID-19 technical response, was reportedly intimately involved in the preparation of the Z Division report.
The classified study weighed the lab leak possibility as well as the theory that the pandemic crossed over naturally from an animal, and concluded that both scenarios were plausible and could not be ruled out.
This explosive conclusion, which came at a time when many experts were loudly clamoring that a lab leak origin was impossible, could have significantly impacted the debate if the study had been more widely circulated.
‘We will not be commenting on this issue,’ Livermore Public Affairs Director Lynda Seaver told DailyMail.com on Tuesday when asked about the delay in the report’s distribution to other government departments.
The slow distribution of the Z Division report across the top levels of government frustrated Trump administration officials and led some of them to seek access to reporting by other intelligence agencies on the subject, according to Sinclair Broadcasting Group, which first revealed the existence of the study.
On May 11, three House Republicans sent a letter to Livermore Director Kimberly S. Budil, demanding that Rakestraw appear before Congress to deliver a classified briefing on the Z Division report…
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