And they wonder why they are called fake news.
A report that aired on ABC news as reported by Josh Margolin and James Gordon Meek alleged that the Trump administration was warned as early as last November about the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, China.
An official from the Defense Department Wednesday vehemently denied the report and rejected the claim that any such assessment existed.
The ABC news report attributed the information to “unnamed officials with knowledge of the assessment.” Ah yes, the old “unnamed officials.”
ABC was so excited to report this.
“We’ve got him now,” they had to be saying in reference to the president. Michael Strahan’s teeth almost straightened out in excitement on Good Morning America as he led into the report.
The screen read, “Missed Warning Signs? Sources: Intelligence officials warned of crisis as early as November”.
The lead in continued:
“So it was just yesterday that President Trump said no one had even heard of the virus two months ago, but we are now learning that as far back as late November, American military medical investigators overseas sounded the alarm to officials right here at home…”
The report continued as reported by National Review:
As far back as late November, U.S. intelligence officials were warning that a contagion was sweeping through China’s Wuhan region, changing the patterns of life and business and posing a threat to the population, according to four sources briefed on the secret reporting.
Concerns about what is now known to be the novel coronavirus pandemic were detailed in a November intelligence report by the military’s National Center of Medical Intelligence (NCMI), according to two officials with the documents contents…
From that warning in November, the sources described repeated briefings through December for policy-makers and decision-makers across the federal government as well as the National Security Council at the White House.
All of that culminated with a detailed explanation of the problem that appeared in the President’s Daily Brief of intelligence matters in early January, the sources said. For something to have appeared in the PDB, it would have had to go through weeks of vetting and analysis, according to people who have worked on presidential briefings in both Republican and Democratic administrations.
“The timeline of the intel side of this may be further back than we’re discussing,” the source said of preliminary reports from Wuhan. “But this was definitely being briefed beginning at the end of November as something the military needed to take a posture on.”
According to Media Research Center (MRC), ABC News also alleged that “by early January the warnings made it into the president’s daily briefing. But it wasn’t until late January that President Trump made his first public comments about this virus saying that he wasn’t at all worried about it and that he had it totally under control.”
Col. R. Shane Day, the director of the NCMI, which is part of the Defense Intelligence Agency, which is a component of the Defense Intelligence Agency countered the ABC News report in a statement:
“As a matter of practice the National Center for Medical Intelligence does not comment publicly on specific intelligence matters,” he said.
“However in the interest of transparency during this current public health crisis, we can confirm that media reporting about the existence/release of a National Center for Medical Intelligence Coronavirus-related product/assessment in November of 2019 is not correct. No such NCMI product exists.”
— Dan Scavino Jr.🇺🇸 (@Scavino45) April 9, 2020
MRC also reported that on the same night’s World News Tonight, David Muir touted, “ABC News reporting tonight that American intelligence officials warned the Trump administration as far back as late November about coronavirus.”
Both the GMA report, as well as the WNT reports ended with the White House correspondent admitting that they had not received any type of confirming statement from the Pentagon.
Wait, what? You mean the media lied???
Well, according to a report in Science News dated January 29, Chinese officials notified the World Health Organization of the existence of the virus on December 31, 2019. It was tied to a seafood market in Wuhan, China.
According to researchers, the first patient diagnosed with the virus got sick on December 1, 2019, AFTER the ABC News report says U.S. officials became aware of it. Wow, pesky little details there.
The research also determined that the market was not the source of the initial case, but only an amplifier of it. No source in or out of China reported any signs of the virus prior to December 1.
In addition, CNN said that both Defense Department as well as CIA officials denied the report.
So, based on available information, National Review posits that one of three things happened.
First, U.S. intelligence was aware of an outbreak in Wuhan before even the local government was…not likely.
Second, the Chinese cover-up of what happened in Wuhan is much bigger than what official Washington was led to believe…possible but not likely.
Or three, ABC got it wrong…most likely.
According to Fox News, the alleged intelligence reported on by ABC was “obtained through wire and computer intercepts and satellite images.” Fox said that ABC News did not respond to them for comment.
A defense official told Fox News that they had spent 24 hours going over information that could be related to the alleged assessment, but didn’t find anything.
President Trump was first advised of the pandemic in a daily briefing at the beginning of January, according to ABC News.
The Pentagon acknowledged that there was intelligence of a possible virus in January that could possibly cross over from China and impact the U.S., however it did not appear to be a grim warning.
MRC reports that although ABC had claimed they would “keep viewers updated” on the story, it had gone away by Thursday morning.
Of course, this isn’t the first time that ABC has had a problem with the truth. Back in October of last year, they produced a sensationalized story entitled “Slaughter in Syria” on World News Tonight on Oct. 13.
They were of course trying to lay the blame for alleged bombing of Syria by Turkey’s military on President Trump, after the withdrawal of U.S. forces from the region.
However, as it turned out, the sensational video ABC showed that was alleged to be the Turkish bombing and gunfire turned out being from a nighttime event that was conducted at a gun range in Kentucky.
According to the Washington Examiner¸ the footage ABC used to hype their story about Trump’s abandoning the Syrians was from a pyrotechnic event at the gun range:
“The footage, which looks to be from 2017, shows American gun enthusiasts putting on a terrific pyrotechnic show for their audience in Kentucky. In fact, the Machine Gun Shoot and Military Gun Show, which involves the very popular night shoot, is an annual event at the Kentucky gun range.
People love the show. They love it so much, in fact, that they record it and post footage of it to social media.”
Some Twitter sleuths saw the video on ABC, and compared it to video of the gun show and…voila! It was the same thing. ABC was forced to apologize and remove the videos from their website.
Wow! ABC News is trying to pass gun range videos as combat footage from Syria pic.twitter.com/zfTWtwwSfZ
— Wojciech Pawelczyk (@PolishPatriotTM) October 14, 2019
CORRECTION: We’ve taken down video that aired on “World News Tonight” Sunday and “Good Morning America” this morning that appeared to be from the Syrian border immediately after questions were raised about its accuracy. ABC News regrets the error.
— Good Morning America (@GMA) October 14, 2019
MRC also reported that CBS had done the same thing on coronavirus reporting, using video footage from a hospital in Italy to pass of as having occurred at a New York City hospital. The network later apologized, saying it was an “editing mistake” MRC said. Apparently there is an editing problem at CBS because the same footage was shown AGAIN the following week.
President Trump is right…”YOU ARE FAKE NEWS.”
—
Want to make sure you never miss a story from Law Enforcement Today? With so much “stuff” happening in the world on social media, it’s easy for things to get lost.
Make sure you click “following” and then click “see first” so you don’t miss a thing! (See image below.) Thanks for being a part of the LET family!
