Michael Shellenberger@shellenberger
United States government officials have for decades reassured the public that they are releasing all they have, save for the most sensitive information, on the origin of Covid, the CIA mind control program known as MKUltra, the JFK assassination, and the Church Committee investigation into the intelligence community (IC) abuses in 1975. In 2023, then-Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Avril Haines delivered a five-page summary of Covid origins in response to a unanimously passed law requiring the declassification of files. MKUltra involved drugging individuals without their knowledge in an effort to control their thoughts and behaviors. The CIA stated in 2022 that it had released 95% of its JFK collection, and the Trump administration released roughly 80,000 pages of JFK records on March 18, 2025.
But an active-duty CIA official testified to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee today that the CIA and the Intelligence Community (IC) are still hiding information. James Erdman III, a senior CIA operations officer who led the Director’s Initiatives Group investigation into Covid origins under DNI Tulsi Gabbard, appeared under subpoena from committee Chairman Rand Paul. Erdman told senators that the CIA “did not comply with lawful oversight” during his investigation, and said, “CIA managers retaliated against [analysts] for their refusal to agree with management’s middle-of-the-night anonymous review.”
Erdman testifie,d “The CIA illegally monitored the computer and phone usage of DIG [Director’s Initiative Group] personnel, their investigations, and contact with whistleblowers…One CIA contractor assisting with the DIG’s investigation into the events that transpired between 2022 and 2023 was fired by the CIA one day after meeting with the DIG.” Erdman said the CIA had not cleared his testimony or written statement before the hearing.
The CIA denounced the hearing as “dishonest political theater,” and not a single Democratic Senator showed up for it. A CIA spokesperson, Liz Lyons, said in a statement that “the Committee acted in bad faith by subpoenaing an Agency officer for testimony today without notifying CIA.” She added that “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.” And she implied the hearing was not needed since “the CIA has already assessed Covid-19 most likely originated from a lab leak, and efforts to undermine that conclusion are disingenuous.”
But the public CIA statement quoted at the hearing did not address Erdman’s specific claims about DIG monitoring, the contractor firing, or the 40 boxes of JFK and MKUltra files. Sen. Paul, who noted that “closed-door testimony doesn’t provide oversight” and “public testimony provides oversight.” The CIA made public in January 2025 a low-confidence assessment that COVID-19 likely had a research-related origin, while saying both lab and natural-origin scenarios remained plausible, which Paul called “a cleanup operation.” Nor did she address Erdman’s claim that, “When the DIG ceased operations, the CIA also took back 40 boxes of JFK files and MKUltra files being processed for declassification by DNI.”
Public reached out to the CIA for comment on Erdman’s specific allegations and will update this article if it replies.
Support for Erdman’s claims came from former CBS News investigative reporter Catherine Herridge. “As early as February,” she wrote on X, “I began receiving credible reporting that @DNIGabbard’s investigative team was being tracked and communications collected because their work was revealing ‘uncomfortable facts.’”
Paul opened the hearing by describing the Biological Sciences Experts Group (BESG), an ODNI advisory body that he said included Dr. Ralph Baric and Dr. Peter Daszak, both of whom collaborated with Wuhan Institute of Virology researchers on coronavirus gain-of-function studies. Daszak, Paul noted, received “hundreds of millions of dollars from the US government and worked with Dr. Zhengli Shi in Wuhan to create gain-of-function coronaviruses,” and that Baric “was also part of BSEG and an active consultant to intelligence agencies on the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Paul noted that “Dozens of times, [former NIAID Director Anthony Fauci] referred to the idea that the pandemic originating in the lab was a conspiracy theory.”
Erdman said that as of August 12, 2021, the CIA was considering calling Covid a lab leak, but that the conclusion “changed on August 17th of 2021.” Erdman told the panel that “the CIA would not provide us documentation that we asked for” and “we have no idea why that changed.” Erdman also testified that “Director Gabbard is working through, I believe, 2,000 pages” of Covid origins records the CIA had been resisting releasing. That figure contrasts with the five-page summary the ODNI delivered to Congress in 2023. Senator Josh Hawley asked Erdman whether the five-page report was “all the information the United States government had,” and Erdman replied, “that is not all the information.”
Erdman described a 2022 CIA “re-look” in which eight of 10 analysts and six of seven technical experts leaned toward a lab leak. He said management overruled the team and changed the analytic line to read that “we may never precisely know the origin of SARS-CoV-2.” Paul noted that there have been over 1,500 major lab leaks.
Sen. Paul revealed that the CIA is still denying him information that Senators are entitled to see under the Constitution, which requires Congressional oversight of the executive branch. Paul said the CIA had resisted releasing to him the underlying Covid origins analyses by its own scientists, even in classified form.
Paul also said, “I’ve been trying to get the classified version of the [1975] Church Committee [files] for over two years,” he said, “but I’m being blocked by the [Intelligence] Committee, including someone from our own party who is blocking me. They’ve shown me a room with 400 boxes. I can go look in all the boxes to see if I can find it. My staff’s not allowed to go in the room.”
The CIA told Senate investigators in 1977 that, after the Church inquiry, it had discovered seven additional boxes of MKUltra files in its retired records center that prior searches had missed. The 1977 hearing identified 149 MKUltra subprojects involving human testing and 33 additional subprojects whose subject matter remained undisclosed.
Reuters reported that in early April 2025, an ODNI team led by Defense Intelligence Agency official Paul Allen McDonald II arrived unannounced at a CIA archival facility in the Washington area to seize Kennedy assassination files. The team included Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, a former CIA officer and daughter-in-law of HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The standoff stretched into the early morning hours and ended only after the CIA agreed to transfer a “massive trove” of documents to the National Archives for digitization.
Why did these cover-ups occur and why are some of them still ongoing? And why didn’t any Democratic senators participate in the hearing?...
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