CIA Director Ratcliffe: We Will Get to the Bottom of Chinese 'Origins of COVID,' Meanwhile TikTok...

The new CIA Director, John Ratcliffe, told Breitbart News that uncovering what the agency knows about the origins of COVID-19 is a top priority. Five years after the pandemic began, evidence still points to the virus being a man-made pathogen “leaked” from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, yet the CIA has not issued a definitive report on the matter.

Ratcliffe emphasized, “This is a ‘day-one’ issue for me. I’ve said before that all our intelligence and common sense suggest COVID came from a lab leak in Wuhan, but the CIA hasn’t made that assessment publicly. I’m focused on making sure the public knows we won’t sit on the sidelines anymore.”

Ratcliffe also noted that U.S. foreign policy and intelligence priorities have long been focused on Russia, but China is now the primary geopolitical threat. “China competes with us economically and strategically in ways Russia can’t,” Ratcliffe said. “We’ve been slow to pivot and confront this threat, but we can’t ignore how deeply China’s Communist Party is involved in undermining our interests. It’s a priority for the president and me to address this.”

Our intelligence agencies are stuck in the 20th Century. It’s like the official dress code at the CIA is parachute pants. And the official power track is Madonna’s “Like a Virgin”

While the spooks of DC are haggling over Putin’s pecks, China has been dominating the digital battlefield.

For most of us, when we think about China as a threat, we think TikTok. One of the few bipartisan laws passed during the Biden administration bans TikTok unless it divests from Chinese ownership due to surveillance concerns. While our attention is captured by TikTok, China has been waging a far more insidious digital campaign against U.S. infrastructure.

During just four years of the Biden administration, Chinese hackers infiltrated at least nine U.S. telecom companies in what Senator Mark Warner called “the largest telecommunications hack in U.S. history.” In 2024, Chinese hackers breached the U.S. Treasury Department, exploiting a software vulnerability. Meanwhile, a botnet of compromised Internet of Things (IoT) devices, tied to Chinese actors, operated undetected for years, showing the scale of these attacks.

Think about this. While millions of us are worried about not being able to see Zach King’s Magic Ride on TikTok, during the Biden-Harris administration, the Communist Party of China may have pulled off the ultimate cyberwar magic trick to gain access to our financial institutions, telecom, government infrastructure, and our supply chains.

China might lose TikTok, but we may have lost our ability to defend against a digital attack.

Just like the COVID virus shut down our economy and threw chaos into our way of life, it also gave China a reprieve from Trump’s tariffs and arguably played a role in his 2020 election loss. In the same way, TikTok may have served as the perfect pandemic of distraction, keeping us glued to our screens while China executed a digital magic virus trick. We’ve been busy perfecting lyp sync dance routines while they’ve been perfecting cyberwarfare.

What’s Next?

As the Trump administration gears up, it’s clear they’re serious about putting American interests first, tackling corruption, and reining in a bloated bureaucracy that seems more concerned with protecting itself—and its financial backers—than serving the American people.

Or, we could all just go back to learning the Trump TikTok dance…

UPDATE: Just one day after Ratcliffe was sworn in as the new CIA director, the CIA released a report, apparently written before Trump took office, concluding "with low confidence" that covid was a lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.

For the full story, visit Breitbart News.