During an interview with the Fox Business Network’s “Maria Bartiromo’s Wall Street” that took place before the release of intelligence on the origins of COVID-19 later that night, former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe noted that by law, the deadline to release the information was days ago and “an administration that talks about the rule of law just selectively picks which laws they want to comply with.” Ratcliffe also argued that the Biden administration didn’t want the report to spoil Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s China trip.
Ratcliffe said, “They didn’t just miss a deadline, they violated the law and it shows how an administration that talks about the rule of law just selectively picks which laws they want to comply with. Look, there [are] a couple of reasons for the delay here: One of them — one of which is that they didn’t want this coming out before Anthony Blinken went on bended knee to Xi Jinping to beg for a meeting and they didn’t want this report complicating that.”
He continued, “But the bigger issue — and I’ve talked to a number of different sources that used to work for me in the intelligence community…they’re working very hard, unfortunately, to try and deliver as China-friendly a version of this report as they can. They’re trying to literally put the genie back in the bottle and keep alive the idea that this could possibly have been a wet market natural origin, when, in fact, more and more evidence supports what I testified to under oath, which is that the circumstantial evidence is overwhelming about a lab leak.”
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