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> "Officials said the agency was not bending its views to a new boss, and that the new assessment had been in the works for some time."

Officials are saying that, true.

I have "low confidence" it actually is true. Everyone since the election has been scrambling to kowtow to the new boss to avoid his wrath.






> Officials are saying that, true.

I have no idea if the report's conclusions are correct, but I doubt a report like that was created in three or four days. Tasking expert analysts, reassigning the manpower necessary and going through legal and secrecy review in 96 hours would be extraordinary for a large bureaucratic agency. Sure, it could happen but that kind of all-hands, crisis urgency is hard to keep quiet. It's something we'd hear about from insider leaks.

I think it's more plausible that the report existed (because we know the CIA did look into it multiple times already) and the previous director had decided not to release it. And now the new director decided differently. Both of those decisions (not release vs release) were probably politically motivated to some extent but we don't have to jump to assuming an entire new report was fabricated with different conclusions practically overnight. After all, most government agencies that looked into it already concluded with low or medium confidence that it was a lab leak. It's not like the CIA report conclusion is an outlier here.


They've had two months to prep for the new felon.

Two months, exactly. And like as not built on internal reports started long ago.

But they also say that there's no new evidence of any kind.

They are just choosing to believe the lab leak hypothesis now, because they spent more time thinking about the conditions of the labs before Covid started.

...

And it's still low confidence... Since there's no evidence.

Sad stuff, really. Any self respecting person would just not express their opinion in such a situation.

Just about the only value of this new report is that it tells Trump what he wants to hear.




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