Judicial Watch received 5 pages of records from the FBI in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request that revealed several officials from the bureau’s Newark Field Office communicated with each other regarding Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
A 2020 email with the subject “Re: Follow up call” detailed “key activity for bat coronavirus surveillance.”
“The key activity for bat coronavirus surveillance is ‘Aim 1 … We will sequence receptor binding domains (spike proteins) to identify viruses with the highest potential for spillover which we will include in our experimental investigations. (Aim 3),'” the email reads.
The email goes on to explain the process of using “de novo synthesis to construct novel viruses encoding different spike proteins in an otherwise-constant genomic context, and we will test the ability of the resulting novel viruses to infect human cells in culture and to infect laboratory animals.”
“We hypothesize that there is a direct correlation between the receptor binding affinity of the spike protein and the abilities to infect human cells in culture and to infect laboratory animals. We will test this hypothesis by asking whether novel viruses encoding spike proteins with the highest receptor-binding affinity have the highest abilities to infect human cells in culture and to infect laboratory animals.”
“The reason I am writing 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***.”
An unknown individual responded to the email, writing, “Hey, are you going to be in office tomorrow? We just interviewed our person from [redacted] again and he provided us with some alarming new info. Give me call if you can.”
The only name that is not redacted on the email thread is then-special agent in charge of the Newark Field Office, Gregory Ehrie.
In May 2020, Ehrie announced his retirement from the FBI.
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said of the email thread, “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.’ These new documents further demonstrate the need for a comprehensive criminal investigation into Fauci’s gain-of-function scandal.”
American Faith reported that EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak and researcher Ralph Baric’s work on COVID-19 was connected to a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) grant.
United States Geological Survey (USGS) National Wildlife Health Center research epidemiologist Tonie Rocke wrote Baric: “Hi Ralph: I have a couple of questions about the SARS-CoV spike glycoproteins you are developing with respect to the DARPA grant we are collaborating on. Do you have time for a call sometime tomorrow?”
Another email discusses “trials in vaccinated bats at [University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill].”
“I think we should just subcontract with UW to engineer the RCN constructs. They are really skilled at it. We typically then produce the master seeds in my lab,” Rocke wrote to Baric.
