Trump played down COVID warnings: report

Agencies found to give early data on virus

WASHINGTON — Beginning in late January 2020, US intelligence agencies reported to senior Trump administration officials that the coronavirus spreading in China threatened to become a pandemic and spark a global health crisis.

But then-President Donald Trump’s public statements over the next two months “did not reflect the increasingly stark warnings coursing through intelligence channels,” including the president’s daily brief, available to Trump and senior members of his administration, according to a report issued Thursday by the House Intelligence Committee.

By February, the intelligence community “had amply warned the White House in time for it to act to protect the country,” committee investigators concluded. Trump claimed in a May 2020 tweet that the intelligence community “only spoke of the Virus in a very non-threatening, or matter of fact, manner,” a statement that “simply does not match the record of intelligence analysis published in late January and February,” the committee found.

Committee staff spent two years examining the intelligence community’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Their report, which was staffed by bipartisan aides but written by the Democrats, who hold the majority on the committee, broadly praises the work of intelligence analysts for providing early warning about the virus for policymakers.

But the report also faulted the intelligence community for not being better prepared to provide comprehensive early warning based on exclusive intelligence. Agencies didn’t move in the outbreak’s early days to use their clandestine sources for collecting unique, potentially useful intelligence about the unfolding situation in China, the committee found. Doing so might have provided administration leaders with more insight than was available in public health channels and nonclassified sources of information.

Among the new steps the committee recommends the intelligence agencies take to prepare for the next pandemic is designating a new center with responsibility for global health security; enhancing intelligence agencies’ ability to quickly collect information when a new disease emerges; and providing more resources to the National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI), a component of the Defense Intelligence Agency that investigators found performed particularly well, but whose early warnings could have been more widely shared with decision-makers.

A spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment on the report.

Indications that a novel coronavirus might be spreading in China caught the attention of US intelligence as early as Dec. 31, 2019, the committee found, when an analyst at the NCMI reviewed a notice shared on ProMED about a mysterious respiratory illness spreading in China, and that had been discussed on social media. The analyst uploaded the notice from ProMED, a publicly accessible system for monitoring disease outbreaks, into an intelligence database called Horizon, which disseminates reports to military intelligence directorates.

Labeled as a “possible pandemic warning update,” it was the first indication within the intelligence community of COVID-19, which had not yet been named.

In the first week of January 2020, “alarming information was circulating throughout the US government,” but most of it came from public health sources, the committee found.

On Jan. 7, the US Embassy in Beijing took note in a cable of the growing outbreak. Some officials at the National Security Council wanted more information but were frustrated that the intelligence community couldn’t provide unique insights from its own clandestine sources.

Soon thereafter, intelligence analysts began focusing more on the disease and started to coordinate analysis for policymakers, the committee found.