AIN'T NO LAW AGAINST BLAMIN' A CHINAMAN:

President Trump was first briefed about the novel coronavirus emerging in China on January 23 and 28, 2020. Vice President Pence, for whom I served as homeland security and counterterrorism advisor, received briefings on the coronavirus at about the same time. From the beginning, the U.S. government had limited access to Wuhan, including the two sites believed most likely to be the sources of the virus: the wet market and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. From those first briefings in January to the present, the definitive account of where SARS-CoV-2 came from has been uncertain.

But that didn't stop some from making irresponsible assumptions. A January 26, 2020 Washington Timesarticle linking the Wuhan Institute to "Beijing's covert bio-weapons program" caught the eye of some in the White House. (The article has since been updated to reflect that its insinuations are insufficiently substantiated.) Over the course of several weeks in late January and February, Pence asked multiple times to be briefed specifically about the allegations in the article. Public reporting indicates that then, as now, the intelligence community could not corroborate nor refute them. At one point, Pence's request for more information came in the form of a sticky note attached to a copy of the article with "What is this?" written in marker in the vice president's handwriting.

Throughout the early months of 2020, Peter Navarro, a Trump aide on economics and trade, embraced and espoused an exaggerated version of the "lab leak" theory both within the White House and publicly. He contended that National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci had secretly directed the development and spread of the virus. Navarro and others relied on untrustworthy sources of information, including Breitbart.com, more than the medical and intelligence professionals in the government. [...]

On February 26, Pence was announced as the new head of the White House's coronavirus task force. After Dr. Nancy Messonier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, had raised the alarm about the virus spreading in the United States, it was widely understood inside the administration that the vice president's job was not to control the disease but to control the narrative. Finding evidence for the lab leak theory seemed to become a public relations imperative.

So the lab leak theory remained popular in the vice president's office. When I raised the fact that the theory still had not been corroborated by the intelligence community, Pence's chief of staff, Marc Short, told me that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo "disagreed." I warned Short of the risks of politicizing intelligence, and ultimately CIA Director Gina Haspel intervened to defend the integrity of the intelligence community and insulate it from political pressure.

Although I was unaware of it at the time, it appears the Trump administration attempted to do through the State Department what the intelligence community would not--hence the recently ended independent investigation by the State Department into the origins of the virus. Pompeo's investigation reportedly began in "late 2020, months after Pompeo and President Donald Trump first claimed that the virus could have originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology."

In his public comments in March 2020, Trump continued to refer to the virus as the "China virus."

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