DOJ secretly investigated nonprofit at center of Wuhan COVID lab leak questions, bombshell House report reveals

The Department of Justice secretly launched a grand jury investigation into a US nonprofit that steered American taxpayer funding to the Chinese lab suspected of leaking the COVID-19 virus and causing the global pandemic, according to a bombshell report released by a House committee on Monday.Scientific experts and former federal officials have suggested that EcoHealth Alliance’s grants to the China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) funded gain-of-function research that could have led to a lab leak — but records requests have repeatedly been blocked by the National Institutes of Health, according to the report.The details of the apparent federal investigation of EcoHealth Alliance remain secret — and members of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, which released the 520-page report on the origins of and response to the pandemic, have declined to talk about it, citing concerns about interfering in any potential DOJ investigation.

However, internal emails and records from EcoHealth Alliance included in the report reveal that the grand jury issued subpoenas for genetic sequences of EcoHealth’s research on viruses in Wuhan, as well as for correspondence between the organization’s president, Dr.Peter Daszak, and Dr.

Shi Zhengli, his collaborator and the so-called “bat lady” at the Wuhan Institute of Virology who specialized on coronaviruses.In one intercepted email, an attorney at the firm Tarter, Krinsky and Drogin tells Daszak to “skip” any reference to the federal probe when asking for more time to comply with documents request from the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which ran its own investigation on the COVID pandemic.“I suppose we can always recite those if we get any pushback on a reasonable extension,” the lawyer writes in the Feb.6, 2023, missive.

“Especially on the Executive Branch front, where the DOJ grand jury investigation seems so far to remain nonpublic, I think it would be better just to say we�...