Dec. 16: Pentagon Knew of Covid Lab Leak in Oct. 2019, Ex-Intel Official Says

"People are pissed at Obama"; A hostage deal by Hanukkah?; Andrew Fox on Gaza casualties

Dec 16, 2024

The Big Story

As President Joe Biden’s team weighs preemptive blanket pardons for figures such as former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases head Dr. Anthony Fauci, and as Democrats drape themselves in the flag to defend “woke” senior Pentagon officials against an expected onslaught from Trump “loyalists,” a handful of recent reports support longstanding allegations that the U.S. defense and intelligence establishment played a role in causing, and then covering up the origins of, the COVID-19 pandemic.

In an interview with the British paper The Sun published on Sunday, retired Pentagon intelligence official Jon Myers said that in October 2019, he began briefing the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, had leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China. If true, that would suggest that the U.S. intelligence community and Pentagon brass were aware of the virus—and aware that it likely came from a lab—two months before the officially acknowledged start of the pandemic. Myers, a former Marine Corps officer who served as a director of regional intelligence at the Pentagon from 2018 to 2020, told the Sun:

This [COVID-19] was briefed in October and November 2019 as a lab leak. It’s important that people realise. It was in the intelligence. We briefed it. It was accepted. I briefed it numerous times about a viral outbreak and that it was from a lab. Over the course of late November and December, it probably came up six or seven times in briefings. Nobody said, “hey I heard that was not true, it was not from a lab.” It was just stated as fact.

Yet by April 2020 (at which point Myers had retired), the JCS had publicly assessed that the virus had a natural origin—an assessment that Myers dismissed as both “political” and concocted for the purposes of “self-preservation.” Myers’ interview follows a report earlier this month from the GOP-led House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic (HSSCP), which revealed that the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) had received classified intelligence about the COVID-19 outbreak in China before the Chinese government announced it in a public notice on PubMed Dec. 31, 2019. Two previous Democrat-led congressional reports—one from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the other from the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, both in 2022—had claimed the DIA did not learn of the virus until the New Year’s Eve PubMed announcement.

Though Myers does not say who was trying to preserve themselves or why, there has long been speculation (including at The Scroll) that the virus that emerged in Wuhan might have had a connection to the U.S. defense and intelligence establishment. In 2018, Peter Daszak of the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance (EHA) and virologist Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina (UNC) submitted a research grant proposal, known as DEFUSE, to the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Though DARPA rejected the proposal, drafts and notes from the proposal revealed that Baric and Daszak intended to use gain-of-function engineering to create a virus with the exact genomic specifications of SARS-CoV-2 at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Molecular biologist Richard Ebright called this revelation the “equivalent of a smoking gun” for establishing the responsibility of Daszak and his associates for the pandemic after journalist Emily Kopp reported it in January.

EHA received more than $123 million in funding from the U.S. government between 2013 and 2020, including $39 million from the Pentagon and $64.7 million from the U.S. Agency for International Aid and Development (USAID), which has historically been used as a cutout for the Central Intelligence Agency. A CIA whistleblower told the HSSCP last year that after six of the seven analysts tasked by the agency to investigate the virus’s origins concluded that it had likely escaped from a lab, the CIA offered them “financial incentives” to reverse their decision, as Tablet reported at the time. In the declassified COVID-19 origins report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the CIA said it was “unable to determine” the origin of the virus.

And at least some former senior health officials suspect a U.S. coverup. In a podcast appearance last month, former director of the Centers for Disease Control Robert Redfield appeared to endorse the theory that the DEFUSE proposal was the ultimate source of the pandemic. Speaking on The Dana Parish Podcast, Redfield said he believed COVID-19 was “intentionally engineered as a part of a biodefense program” and that the U.S. government, including the Pentagon, the National Institutes of Health, and USAID bore “substantial” responsibility for the pandemic. Identifying Baric, specifically, as the “mastermind” behind the virus, Redfield said, “There is a real possibility that the virus’s birthplace was Chapel Hill,” North Carolina—the home of Baric’s employer, UNC.

IN THE BACK PAGES: Jamie Betesh Carter interviews the “queen of Jewish cooking,” Joan Nathan, on how you can actually cook with your kids this Hanukkah

The Rest

→“People are pissed at Obama” for engineering the Democratic Party’s 2024 electoral wipeout while helping to enrich his former aides, Democratic fundraiser, pundit, and DNC National Finance Committee member Lindy Li told journalist Mark Halperin on the Friday edition of 2Way Tonight, Halperin’s YouTube show. Here’s a transcript (emphasis ours):

People are pissed at Obama. There are people who are now multimillionaires as a result of the Harris campaign, and we know exactly who they are. And I have to say, half a billion dollars in advertising went to just four well-connected Democratic firms. This whole thing is deeply incestuous. And one of the firms is Bully Pulpit. They made bank. We were advertising in Florida, where we had no chance of winning, simply because of the advertising fees. This was a boondoggle. And I’m wondering … were they asking us for money two weeks before they knew they were going to lose because they realized that for the next four to eight years, it was never going to come again, and they wanted to milk us for as much money as possible?

Bully Pulpit, formally known as Bully Pulpit International, is a “strategic communications agency with close ties to the Biden White House,” according to a 2023 report in Axios. A “revolving door for comms talent within Democratic administrations,” BPI was founded in 2009 by Andrew Bleeker, the digital marketing director for Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns, and Ben Coffey Clark, a former journalist turned Democratic operative.

→A hostage deal between Israel and Hamas is “expected to be completed” by the start of Hanukkah on Dec. 25, according to an Israeli official quoted in a Sunday story in Israel Hayom. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Hamas had made two major concessions, according to Arab negotiators: First, it will consent to the Israel Defense Forces temporarily remaining in northern Gaza; second, it will hand over a list of the hostages to be released in a potential deal for the first time since the previous truce last year. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke to U.S. President-elect Donald Trump on Sunday in a conversation focused on the need to “complete Israel’s victory,” per a video message from Netanyahu, and reportedly told Trump “that the U.S. must pressure negotiators to agree to a much higher number of hostages being released.” In a Monday press conference, Trump reiterated his warning that if Hamas does not release the hostages by the time of his inauguration on Jan. 20, “all Hell is going to break out.”

→Explosion of the Day:

That video, shared by @sentdefender on X, shows the results of a Sunday night Israeli airstrike in western Syria near Tartus. The target is reported to have been a Syrian Air Force base that doubled as a storage site for surface-to-surface missiles, which created the large secondary explosion seen in the video. On Monday, the new de facto leader of Syria, Ahmed al-Sheraa (better known by his nom de guerre Abu Mohammed al-Jolani), told a gathering of foreign journalists in Damascus that while he does not want conflict with Israel, “There is no justification for the Israelis to bomb Syrian facilities or advance inside Syria.” Sheraa, who came to power in what Trump colorfully described on Monday as a “hostile takeover” backed by Turkey, claimed that the Syrian rebels had removed the threat of Iranian-backed militias using Syrian territory and additionally promised to respect the 1974 Syrian-Israeli Disengagement Agreement, which ended the Yom Kippur War.

→And it’s not just Syria that’s experiencing regime change: German Chancellor Olaf Scholz lost a confidence vote in the Bundestag on Monday, collapsing the sitting German government and setting the country up for new elections early next year. In Canada, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland resigned Monday from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s cabinet after Trudeau asked her to accept a different cabinet role; in a letter posted to her X account, Freeland criticized Trudeau for his “costly political gimmicks” in the face of the threat of “aggressive economic nationalism” from Trump’s United States. (Rumors circulated Monday that Trudeau would soon resign, but he had not done so yet as of the time of our writing on Monday afternoon.) And France’s governing coalition collapsed earlier this month after the National Assembly voted to remove Prime Minister Michel Barnier, forcing President Emmanuel Macron to task a replacement, the 73-year-old centrist François Bayrou, with forming a new government.

→A new report from Tablet contributor Andrew Fox and the U.K.-based Henry Jackson Society finds that civilian casualty statistics in Gaza have been consistently inflated by the Hamas-controlled Gaza Ministry of Health (MOH) and misreported by Western media. Although an accurate casualty count cannot be determined, Fox and his team of researchers note that in addition to well-known problems, such as the MOH not distinguishing between combatants and civilians, the ministry also inflates civilian casualties by including at least 5,000 natural deaths per year in its casualty counts and reclassifying adult male fatalities as women and children. The report further notes that family reports of fatalities, which are less subject to centralized political manipulation than the hospital reports that account for roughly 80% of the total reported casualty count in Gaza, consistently show adult men accounting for more than 60% of all fatalities; in contrast, the hospital reports show women and children as the majority of those killed:

You can read the full report here, and read Tablet’s previous analysis of the MOH’s statistical shenanigans here.

→Among the recipients of President Biden’s mass clemency order last week was former Pennsylvania judge Michael Conahan, convicted in the notorious “cash for kids” scandal. Along with another corrupt judge, Conahan received millions of dollars in cash kickbacks in exchange for “helping to construct two for-profit juvenile detention facilities in Luzerne County and then sentencing young people to those facilities to keep them full,” according to an opinion piece in The Washington Post by Heather Long, a Pennsylvania journalist who covered the scandal when it broke in 2008. Another Biden clemency recipient, The Washington Free Beacon reported last week, was Rita Crundwell, the former comptroller of Dixon, Illinois, who embezzled $53 million from the city to breed racehorses.

Why would Biden issue clemency to such obviously corrupt individuals? Because the NGO Borg that ran much of his administration asked him to. New York magazine’s Eric Levitz noted on X that in 2021, the American Civil Liberties Union and several other “criminal justice reform” nonprofits sent a letter to the Biden administration requesting clemency for all prisoners who had been granted home confinement under the CARES Act at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The administration appears to have simply granted that request without vetting the individual recipients. A White House spokesman told the Post that the clemency grants had not been a “case-by-case decision”; rather, “the Biden team set broad criteria, and Conahan matched them.”

→Quote of the Day:

For the first time ever, neither Russia nor Iran nor Hezbollah could defend this abhorrent regime in Syria. And this is a direct result of the blows that Ukraine and Israel have delivered upon their own self-defense, with unflagging support of the United States.

That was President Joe Biden taking credit for the collapse of the Assad regime on Sunday, in remarks that one expert described to The Washington Post as “like the rooster taking credit for the dawn.”

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How to (Actually) Cook With Your Kids for Hanukkah

With some help in the kitchen from Joan Nathan

by Jamie Betesh Carter

I always aspire to cook with my children. While I’ve become a professional at “baking from a box,” my cooking/baking-from-scratch skills could use some polishing. I find immense joy in cooking with my kids, and it’s become a great tool for me to process grief and loss. It’s also one of the most significant ways I feel I can pass on traditions from family members whom my kids will never meet.

But, cooking with children is hard. It can be messy, and can take more than twice as long as it would doing it by yourself. The frustration can make you question why you did it in the first place, and can make you want to just skip this entire ordeal and go buy the damn cookie (instead of baking it).

Enter the queen of Jewish Cooking—Joan Nathan—with her book A Sweet Year: Jewish Celebrations and Festive Recipes for Kids and Their Families, containing Jewish recipes for families to cook together. Originally published in 1988, when Nathan had young children, the book was updated in 1995, and has now been updated again, this time with Nathan as a grandmother.

In A Sweet Year, Nathan organizes the chapters according to the major Jewish holidays, including the Sabbath. She outlines entire meals, like “Rosh Hashanah Lunch” and “Shabbat Winter Friday Night Menu.” These recipes are presented in a way that encourages adults and children to cook together. Instructions are broken down by what the children can do on their own, what the adults should do on their own, and what the adults and children can do together.

While the core of the book has remained the same since its first edition, in this third edition, Nathan includes new recipes that are more popular with families today (rainbow challah and tahini shakes) and updates classic dishes like chicken soup. And Judaism isn’t just infused through the recipes; Nathan provides explanations, prayers, and blessings for the Jewish rituals and holidays, as well as personal stories about her expanding family through the years.

While I always get excited whenever Nathan publishes a new book, this one intrigued me most of all as a mother to two young children. Not only does A Sweet Year inspire you to cook Jewish recipes with your kids, it aims to take the stress out of it by breaking down how to do it. I sat down with Nathan to chat about what it was like republishing this book as a grandmother, just in time for Hanukkah.

***

I love to cook with my children, but I usually find it very hard to do. I loved the way you frame this book—providing full menus and clear instructions on how to involve children. What was your motivation to update this book? And why now?

This is a way bigger, totally changed edition. I retested every single recipe and I realized that a lot of them either didn’t taste good to me, or they weren’t as up-to-date as I’d like for our modern world. And then I went to different places, and wanted to include dishes from those experiences, like a carrot dip I had in Australia, and a soup my children had in Warsaw. And then I added some recipes from my friends who are chefs with children or grandchildren.

I have grandchildren now, and I’m cooking again with them, but it’s different. I have a lot of knowledge that I have learned through the years. Children today are much more into food than they were before because parents are more into real ingredients. I wanted that for my children, and now I want it for my grandchildren. When you look at a food you’ve made, you’re going to look at it differently.

How did it feel different to republish this book as a grandmother? Making the recipes for this book and thinking about grandchildren versus your own children when they were little?

When I made the book with my grandchildren, their parents went on vacation, so they were alone with me. They listened to me, and they felt very important. I also made sure that I had a babysitter that they loved.

Most importantly, it was fun. I let them be mischievous. I told them stories about the food we were making, and about their parents’ childhood. I think they’ll remember this forever, and now they’ll have this book as a memory.

I love how comprehensive this book is, and I could see this really being a guide for someone who wants to cook Shabbat dinner with their kids or their grandkids, but doesn’t really know how to start. This actually tells them what to make, how to incorporate the kids, and it also gives a Jewish meaning. I’m curious about your thinking behind including more of that Jewish religious context in here, such as the prayers. What made you want to do that versus just being a straight-up cookbook?

Anyone could do a straight up cookbook, right? Judaism is a big part of my home, and I wanted this to be inclusive for anybody that wants Jewishness in their home. For example, making challah is a big part of my life, so I wanted to explain how to do that with kids and how to make it fun. And if we’re teaching people how to create this ritual, it makes sense to include the blessings. I’ve always felt that cooking has always been a source of connection for people, and I hope this book can be one as well.

Some of us with young children really want to cook with our kids, but it can be really hard and messy. Sometimes I’m guilty of saying, "OK, I’ll just make this while you’re out at the park," because that seems easier. What are you hoping this book does for people like me with young kids, or anyone who wants to cook with the children in their lives?

That’s another reason that I wrote it. It’s easier for me just to cook with them (as the grandmother), because I’m not doing all the other things that you have to do like take them to school, and cook three meals a day. It’s easier to bring in a grandmother and ask her to make challah with the kids.

It definitely takes a lot of organization and planning to cook with kids. I’d say start with something more simple like pancakes, have them help put the berries and bananas in. Do it in steps, and take breaks. Make the batter the night before, and the next morning they can help spoon out the batter.

It’s not always easy to cook with kids but when you do it, some magic happens. I’m curious if you want to explain why it’s so important to not just feed your children and your grandchildren these beautiful, traditional Jewish recipes, but why is it important to include them in the process?

I think they learn a lot from us. You don’t know how much they’re going to learn depending on their age, but they’re going to learn. They’re also going to have the memory of cooking with their grandparents, and that will stick with them for the rest of their lives. And your life is going to be shorter than theirs.

I think a lot of us parents are scared to death about doing something wrong with our children, so this is something fun to do with them.

I’m 81 years old and still to this day, I remember making a plum tart for Rosh Hashanah with my mother. I would watch her so carefully, and help her put those plums in to make it look beautiful in circles. I still remember this cloth that she would roll the dough out on, and then she’d fill it, and she’d roll it up like a jelly roll, bake it and then cut it as a cookie. And it was so delicious, but more so I remember the process.

When you think of Hanukkah and the food it involves, it can be exciting and delicious. But I’m already thinking about my kids getting burned with oil while we try to make latkes or sufganiyot. I love how you provided a range of recipes from no-bake edible dreidels, to baking Hanukkah cookies from scratch. Is there anything you want to say about this specific holiday and involving your kids or grandchildren in cooking or baking this Hanukkah?

The key is involving them in the important steps. When I made my Aunt Lisl’s butter cookie recipe from the book, I made the dough beforehand and I had all kinds of cookie cutters around so the kids could make the cookies. I’ve also prepared the sufganiyot dough in advance, and had the children put the jelly in. And as they’re drying, we can sit with the children and play dreidel. It’s about being organized with your cooking, not cooking all of the dishes at once, and having fun.

So many cultures have a very close, interesting relationship with food. What do you think our unique relationship with food is as a Jewish people? In a Jewish context, like what makes this so important for us?

I think number one is the whole concept of the People of the Book. A lot of these recipes are documented, and we’ve had them since the second century.

It was also so important for me to include recipes from the diaspora, from all these countries, not just in Israel, but all over the world. We can get the recipes because they’ve been handed down orally from generation to generation.

And that’s the beauty of Judaism. A lot of these recipes were documented earlier than any other civilization, and we’ve carried them because of the cycle of holidays throughout the year, and we also have the Sabbath. There is something about this repetitiousness throughout history.

What do you hope this book does in the world in its third iteration? Who do you hope buys it and uses it? And how do you hope it lives on and inspires people?

First of all, my wish is that people have fun with it, and that they don’t take it too seriously. That’s why it is for kids and their families. I hope parents and grandparents look through it with their children and grandchildren and say, “This is what I want to make.”

And for those who don’t know anything about Judaism, I hope this will help them learn. In my history of writing about food, there have been so many people that have married into Judaism who have loved my books because I explain things easily and they’re reader-friendly. They’re not put off by them. And I think for those who want to cook, but are a little bit afraid of cooking, this book can be lots of fun.