A new COVID-19 revelation has come about via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request released Friday.
In the FOIA, internal FBI communications show the Bureau was tipped off in April 2020 that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), under the leadership of Dr. Anthony Fauci, had funded coronavirus gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The "alarming" nature of the FOIA draws on a paragraph in the NIAID grant's "description," which, in its original form, appears to be erased from the internet. Nonetheless, the paragraph in the FOIA mentions how a "novel" coronavirus would be engineered "to infect human cells" while leaving no trace of its lab origins — thereby misleading future researchers — in the case of a future outbreak — that the novel virus had sprung out of nature.
Judicial Watch released the five FOIA pages of internal FBI communications on Friday.
"These smoking gun documents showed the FBI quickly understood that Fauci's agency funded the gain-of-function research that could disguise the resulting coronavirus as 'natural,'" Tom Fitton, Judicial Watch President, said, according to the New York Post.
"These new documents further demonstrate the need for a comprehensive criminal investigation into Fauci's gain-of-function scandal."
On April 23, 2020, the FBI email exchange took place under the subject line "Follow up call." A person, whose name has been redacted, shared information and analysis with several officials from the FBI Newark Field Office regarding the $661,980 grant awarded by the NIAID to EcoHealth Alliance for bat coronavirus research at the Wuhan lab.
"The reason I am writing," the unnamed individual wrote to the FBI, "is that the experimental strategy proposed in Aim 3 ('infectious clone technology'), if performed using commercial or in-house gene synthesis to prepare the infectious clones, *** would leave no signatures of purposeful human manipulation***."
"Hey are you going to be in office tomorrow?" one agent wrote in a forward of the email. "We just interviewed our person from [redacted] and he provided us with some alarming new info. Give me call if you can."
"This interesting," an unnamed agent wrote to Newark Field Office Special Agent in Charge Gregory Ehrie. "I'm following up with the squad tomorrow morning."
"Details when you can," Ehrie replied.
Emails obtained by Judicial Watch show FBI inquired into the grant for bat coronavirus at the Wuhan lab in May of 2020.
Last year, the FBI concluded that the most likely cause of the COVID-19 pandemic was an accidental lab leak.
"The FBI has, for quite some time now, assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan," FBI Director Christopher Wray stated on March 2023.