The Daily Mail has a bombshell report on COVID that it’s couching as coming from an “ex-Trump official.” Before we get to any of that, in the interests of facts, the man’s name is David Asher and he’s not an “ex-Trump official.” He’s a man who often works under contract with the federal government to conduct complex and sensitive investigations. He did work as a contractor for the State Department during the Trump years. That does not make him an “ex-Trump official” in the usual understanding of such terms.
He did work for the State Department during the first Bush 43 term and is currently at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. I’m laying all this out, because media tend to use connections to Trump as a pejorative, to discredit what an individual says by association with Trump. Many will read “ex-Trump official” and dismiss what Asher says out of hand.
David Asher was, until recently, investigating COVID’s origins. He says it’s “ridiculous” to even think that COVID jumped from bats or any other animal to humans.
‘We were finding that despite the claims of our scientific community, including the National Institutes of Health and Dr. Fauci’s NIAID organization, there was almost no evidence that supported a natural, zoonotic evolution or source of COVID-19,’ former State Department official David Asher told Fox News on Thursday.
Asher was part of the State Department’s arms control and verification bureau when his then-boss, Mike Pompeo, ordered an investigation into the source of the virus that causes COVID-19.
Fauci has done a fine job of discrediting himself over the past year, even on the question of COVID’s origins. He once dismissed the lab leak theory out of hand but has recently admitted that he can’t rule it out. Ruling it out is exactly what he did early on, when there was less evidence available than there is now.
Biden terminated the investigation Asher was conducting, then reversed that quickly and called for another one, without Asher. Americans deserve honest answers about that, but this administration is blacking out media coverage of the border chaos, and many in the media seem content with that. Terminating the previous COVID investigation had at least one effect — it removed Asher from the work.
There is precedent at work here, both in Asher investigating very sensitive issues, and Democrats terminating his investigations.
A few years back, Asher was profiled in a Politico piece about the Obama administration’s scuttling of an investigation he was leading that looked into the finances of Islamic terrorist groups Hizballah and Hamas. That was Project Cassandra.
The (Obama) Justice Department declined requests by Project Cassandra and other authorities to file criminal charges against major players such as Hezbollah’s high-profile envoy to Iran, a Lebanese bank that allegedly laundered billions in alleged drug profits, and a central player in a U.S.-based cell of the Iranian paramilitary Quds force. And the State Department rejected requests to lure high-value targets to countries where they could be arrested.
“This was a policy decision, it was a systematic decision,” said David Asher, who helped establish and oversee Project Cassandra as a Defense Department illicit finance analyst. “They serially ripped apart this entire effort that was very well supported and resourced, and it was done from the top down.”
Project Cassandra’s goal was to map out the networks and activities that feed money into the terrorist armies’ coffers. That’s an extremely complex undertaking, which can be accomplished by a handful of experts across a few fields. It was turning up banks and drug networks that were helping finance the sprawling terror networks. Iran, under heavy sanctions, was finding it increasingly difficult to finance its terrorists, so they were engaging in drug and other trafficking to pay their bills. Project Cassandra was successfully mapping all this out.
Within the intelligence community, Asher is seen as something of a real-life Tony Stark without the Iron Man suit. He’s taken on these complex investigations and unearthed a great deal.
He’s also dealt with a government that didn’t appreciate where his investigations led, per the Politico report.
Asher, for one, said Obama administration officials expressed concerns to him about alienating Tehran before, during and after the Iran nuclear deal negotiations. This was, he said, part of an effort to “defang, defund and undermine the investigations that were involving Iran and Hezbollah,” he said.
“The closer we got to the [Iran deal], the more these activities went away,” Asher said. “So much of the capability, whether it was special operations, whether it was law enforcement, whether it was [Treasury] designations — even the capacity, the personnel assigned to this mission — it was assiduously drained, almost to the last drop, by the end of the Obama administration.”
With much fanfare, Obama announced the final agreement on implementation of the Iran deal on Jan. 17, 2016, in which Tehran promised to shelve efforts to build a nuclear weapons program in exchange for being released from crippling international economic sanctions.
Within months, task force officials said, Project Cassandra was all but dead. Some of its most senior officials, including Jack Kelly, the veteran DEA supervisory agent who created and led the task force, were transferred to other assignments. And Asher himself left the task force long before that, after the Defense Department said his contract would not be renewed.
The Obama administration created a brain drain when it junked Cassandra.
Now the Biden has junked another vital investigation, this one looking into COVID’s origins.
[Asher] said the lab in Wuhan, which was known for its research on bat coronaviruses, has become a focal point for investigators.
‘That was the epicenter of synthetic biology in the People’s Republic of China, and they were up to some very hairy stuff with synthetic biology and so-called gain-of-function techniques,’ Asher said.
He reiterated that the notion the virus jumped from bats is far-fetched.
‘To say this came out of a zoonotic situation, it’s ridiculous,’ he said.
Asher’s investigation was not completed. The Biden administration ended it.
Suppose Asher is right (which he may not be, and his investigation had its critics within the government). If COVID came from a lab — leaked or otherwise — and did not have zoonotic origins…
Add in Joe Biden’s financial connection to China through his son, Hunter. Hunter’s laptop files also named Kamala Harris.
Add in the U.S. media’s financial connections to China. Consider the censorship social media imposed on anyone who questioned COVID’s origins over the past year, and on the Hunter Biden laptop contents stories.
Consider China’s behavior, and the WHO’s failure to properly investigate COVID’s beginnings.
It doesn’t take Fox Mulder to see lines of evidence and where they may lead.
Even the possibly compromised Biden is at least sounding like this is an issue as a political storm rises.
After months of minimizing that possibility as a fringe theory, the Biden administration is joining worldwide pressure for China to be more open about the outbreak, aiming to head off GOP complaints the president has not been tough enough as well as to use the opportunity to press China on alleged obstruction.
Biden has only been tough on the American people, whom he wants in masks forever and calls racist at every opportunity. He has been a friend to Mexican drug cartels, coyotes, and even China’s communists thus far.
Where does this nightmare lead? Even the best investigators end up at incorrect conclusions sometimes. Has David Asher, in this case?