The Democrats’ report, which is replete with blacked-out sections after a declassification review by ODNI, looks closely at exactly when and how the intelligence community first learned about the virus, what warnings were given to the Trump White House and what steps investigators believe agencies should take to be better prepared for future pandemics. The House investigators didn’t have access to presidential briefing documents, but they said they were able to piece together from documents and interviews what information most likely made it to Trump’s intelligence briefing.
Investigators said they were “unable to corroborate” reports by NBC News and ABC News that U.S. spies collected raw intelligence in November indicating a health crisis in Wuhan, China.
The report says the first intelligence report mentioning the virus that would become known as coronavirus or Covid-19 came on the day of the first media report about it.
On Dec. 31, 2019, an analyst at the National Center for Medical Intelligence, a component of the Defense Intelligence Agency, noticed a report on a public health listserv run by the Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases, known as ProMED, about an unexplained pneumonia that Chinese officials were seeing in Wuhan.
The analyst, identified as Mark, flagged the notice in a report titled “Note: Possible Pandemic Warning Update” and put it in a database that is used by U.S. military commanders around the world.
“Mark had … flagged the disease as an event that warranted close scrutiny,” the House report said.
The same day, The Associated Press published a story about the ProMED notice, which came to the attention of White House officials, the House report says. Over the next few days and weeks, National Security Council officials asked the intelligence agencies to figure out what the Chinese government was hiding and whether there was, in fact, human-to-human transmission of the virus, the report says. But as an official told investigators, intelligence agencies “weren’t giving us anything.”
U.S. spy agencies have an array of satellites that can photograph unusual activity around hospitals and vast capabilities to intercept phone calls and emails among Chinese government officials. They can also use supercomputers to glean insights from vast troves of social media and other “open source” intelligence. But none of those capabilities were brought to bear in a way that produced fruitful insights to help U.S. officials to understand what was happening with Covid in China, the House report concludes.
The report quotes an intelligence agency briefer telling a White House official that “we’re just not structured” to provide information about the emerging pandemic.
Nonetheless, on Jan. 24, 2020, the National Center for Medical Intelligence issued an intelligence report saying that “since mid-December, a novel coronavirus has emerged in China, which has a roughly even chance of becoming a global pandemic during the next four months.”
The notion that Trump failed to convey to the public what he knew about the dangers of the coronavirus isn’t new. Trump acknowledged downplaying the threat in taped interviews with Bob Woodward for his book “Rage.”
“I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down because I don’t want to create a panic,” Trump said in a March 19, 2020, call with Woodward.
