Senators Warn CIA Director Not to Retaliate Against Whistleblower

Senators are warning the CIA’s director not to take action against an operations officer who told the Senate on May 13 that CIA personnel believed COVID-19 came from a laboratory in China but agency leaders changed those conclusions.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who is the chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), a member of the committee, said in a letter to CIA Director John Ratcliffe on May 14, “We expect no retaliatory action of any kind to be taken against [James Erdman III] in connection with his appearance before the Committee.”

Erdman, who is still employed by the CIA, appeared after being subpoenaed, the senators said.

The CIA did not respond to a request for comment. Ratcliffe has not commented on Erdman or his allegations.

Liz Lyons, a spokeswoman for the agency, said on X this week that senators “acted in bad faith by subpoenaing an Agency officer for testimony today without notifying CIA, despite having already obtained closed-door testimony from the individual previously.”

She said that Erdman was not a whistleblower and that the hearing at which he testified “amounts to nothing more than dishonest political theater.”

Erdman told senators during the hearing that he led a team assembled by Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard that reviewed documents and interviewed CIA personnel. He said the team learned that personnel came to believe that COVID-19 came from the lab in Wuhan, China, near where the first COVID-19 cases appeared in 2019, and that it has a history of experimenting with bat coronaviruses.

Those conclusions were changed by leaders after Dr. Anthony Fauci—at the time the head of the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which provided funds to the Wuhan lab—met with intelligence officials and directed them to speak with experts associated with him, Erdman said.

“The CIA and DNI analytic managers responsible for examining the origin of COVID made decisions inconsistent with the conclusions of subject matter experts and analytical tradecraft, consistently favoring the theory of zoonosis or natural origin,” Erdman said during the hearing in Washington.

The CIA maintained that the lab was not the origin of COVID-19 until early 2025, after President Donald Trump was sworn into office, when it said a lab origin was “more likely.”

Erdman told senators this week that the CIA did not clear his testimony and that he returned to work in April after taking a couple of weeks off for vacation.

“I’ve got a desk, and they’re talking to me about what comes next,” he said.