Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is pushing to declassify documents related to the COVID-19 pandemic and Havana syndrome before she leaves the administration at the end of June, an ODNI official told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The clock is tight. Gabbard's departure is set for the end of the month, giving her roughly three and a half weeks to pry loose intelligence that lawmakers and the public have sought for years, on two of the most contested national-security questions of the past decade.
An unnamed ODNI official laid out the scope plainly:
"DNI Gabbard is actively working to declassify information about the COVID-19 pandemic and Anomalous Health Incidents before June 30."
What specific documents will see daylight, and how much will remain redacted, is still unknown. But the effort touches two subjects where the intelligence community's credibility has taken serious damage, and where previous administrations slow-walked transparency at every turn.
The full scope of intelligence about the source of COVID-19 has generated intense public interest since 2020. Congress tried to force the issue in 2023, unanimously passing a law requiring the declassification of intelligence related to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the high-security lab with ties to the Chinese military that sat at the center of the pandemic.
The Biden administration's response was thin. Avril Haines, President Joe Biden's intelligence chief, released a brief summary report. That was it.
CIA whistleblower James Erdman III told the Senate a different story. Testifying in May, Erdman said he had reviewed thousands of pages of material that Haines never released. He alleged that some in the intelligence community had suppressed evidence of a lab accident in Wuhan, China.
Erdman went further. He said Anthony Fauci connected the intelligence community to preferred scientists in order to advance the theory that the virus emerged naturally, rather than from a lab. Fauci's institute at the National Institutes of Health directed money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for coronavirus engineering research, a funding pipeline that has drawn bipartisan scrutiny for years.
If Erdman's testimony is accurate, the gap between what Congress demanded and what Haines delivered is not a bureaucratic oversight. It is a deliberate withholding, exactly the kind of institutional stonewalling that erodes public trust in the agencies charged with protecting the country.
Gabbard's tenure as DNI was marked by friction with intelligence-community insiders from the start. Her office faced direct confrontation with the CIA well before this final push on declassification.
The second front in Gabbard's declassification effort involves anomalous health incidents, the mysterious condition commonly known as Havana syndrome. A CIA officer stationed in Havana, Cuba, first reported a cluster of symptoms in 2016. Since then, dozens of U.S. officials and intelligence personnel have described a loud noise and intense pressure in the head and ears, followed by severe headaches, brain fog, blurred vision, tinnitus, and vertigo.
The Government Accountability Office has noted that Americans affected by these symptoms may struggle to get care. The NIH has studied the condition and found severe symptoms but no evidence of MRI-detectable brain injury or biological abnormalities, a finding that raises as many questions as it settles.
A declassified January 2025 intelligence community report revealed a sharp internal split. Five agencies assessed that Havana syndrome is "very unlikely" to be caused by a foreign actor. One agency assessed that it is "likely" a foreign actor developed a novel weapon causing some of the symptoms. A seventh agency put the odds at roughly 50-50.
That kind of disagreement, buried in classified assessments and released in sanitized summaries, is precisely what fuels suspicion that the full picture is being kept from the public. Affected personnel, people who served their country and came home with debilitating symptoms, deserve better than a bureaucratic shrug.
Gabbard is stepping down from her post for deeply personal reasons. Her time leading the intelligence community drew praise from supporters who saw her as willing to challenge entrenched interests, and sharp criticism from those who questioned her credentials.
Whatever one thinks of her tenure, the declassification push is the right call. Congress voted unanimously for transparency on COVID origins three years ago. The Biden-era ODNI delivered a summary and called it a day. Thousands of pages, if Erdman's account holds, sat untouched.
The question now is whether three and a half weeks is enough time to move material through the classification review process, or whether this effort will stall the moment Gabbard walks out the door. Her successor will inherit whatever remains undone.
The political reaction to Gabbard's exit has been predictable. Some Democrats and media figures moved quickly to frame her departure in partisan terms rather than engage with the substance of what she accomplished, or tried to.
But the substance matters more than the politics. On COVID origins, the American public funded the research, endured the lockdowns, buried the dead, and watched their children fall behind in school. They have a right to know what the intelligence community found, all of it, not a curated excerpt chosen by officials with every incentive to protect their own reputations.
On Havana syndrome, U.S. personnel put themselves in harm's way and came back with symptoms severe enough to end careers. The intelligence community owes them a straight answer, not a five-to-one-to-one split hidden behind classification stamps.
Several critical unknowns remain. No one outside ODNI has said which specific documents are in the declassification pipeline. No one has explained what portions, if any, will stay classified. And the mechanism for completing the review, who signs off, who publishes, has not been described publicly.
There is also the matter of Erdman's testimony. He told the Senate that intelligence officials suppressed evidence and that Fauci steered the community toward preferred scientists. Those are serious allegations from a sworn whistleblower. If the declassified material corroborates his claims, the accountability conversation changes overnight. If it doesn't, the public will at least have the evidence to judge for itself.
Either way, sunlight is the right answer. Gabbard promised transparency when she took the job. Delivering it on the way out would be a fitting final act.
The intelligence community spent years telling the public to trust the experts. The least it can do now is show its work.
