President Biden signed the COVID-19 Origin Act of 2023 that proclaimed he would declassify the origins of COVID and the intelligence on the Wuhan lab by last Sunday but the deadline came and went and he still hasn’t done it.

(Video Credit: Fox News)

It was a measure that was passed unanimously in Congress and that Biden signed into law in late March. Notably, the deadline passed just before Secretary of State Antony Blinkin visited Chinese communist dictator Xi Jinping. The law gave the Office of the Director of National Intelligence 90 days to declassify and release intelligence on the Wuhan Institute of Virology and its connections to the emergence of SARS-CoV-2.

The law mandated that Biden declassify any and all information regarding the connection between the Wuhan-based laboratory and the origins of COVID by June 18.

It instructed Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines to “declassify any and all information relating to potential links between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the origin” of COVID-19, including intelligence on the “activities performed by the Wuhan Institute of Virology with or on behalf of the People’s Liberation Army” and “coronavirus research or other related activities performed at the Wuhan Institute of Virology prior to the outbreak” of SARS-CoV-2.

The legislation also ordered the Biden administration to hand over any information on the “researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology who fell ill in autumn 2019.”

Watch: Fox’s @JacquiHeinrich on the White House missing a deadline to release new documents on Covid’s origin: “Fox is told the work to declassify that intelligence is ‘complicated but is happening’, and the release could come as soon as this week.” pic.twitter.com/n9tC9suzdp

— TV News Now (@TVNewsNow) June 21, 2023

“Sunday is the deadline for the Biden Administration to declassify the origins of COVID,” former White House press secretary Sean Spicer tweeted before the deadline rolled around.

Sunday is the deadline for the Biden Administration to declassify the origins of Covid

— Sean Spicer (@seanspicer) June 16, 2023

As the deadline passed, conservatives and COVID experts started speculating that the Biden administration had deliberately ignored it. It was posited that was because they didn’t want anything to derail Blinken’s groveling conversations with Chinese officials which included a brief meeting with President Xi Jinping.

“Doesn’t it seem a little strange how you miss the deadline a day before Blinken’s meeting with Xi?” Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer wondered out loud during a segment, pointing out that if the administration had truly been serious about meeting the deadline, they should have delivered on the promise the Friday before so as not to miss it on Sunday due to the Juneteenth holiday weekend.

Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) asserted that Blinken’s trip to China was not a legitimate excuse for missing the deadline. He declared that the American people deserved to know what had happened and how the virus originated.

“The White House is now overdue to declassify their COVID lab leak intel, and there is no ‘Secretary of State is meeting with Xi Jinping’ exception in the law President Biden signed. We need to know the truth about how this pandemic started and China’s role in covering it up, and the White House must respect the text of the law passed unanimously in both chambers by the people’s representatives,” he proclaimed via Twitter.

The White House is now overdue to declassify their COVID lab leak intel, and there is no ‘Secretary of State is meeting with Xi Jinping’ exception in the law President Biden signed.

We need to know the truth about how this pandemic started and China’s role in covering it up,…

— Senator Mike Braun (@SenatorBraun) June 20, 2023

The White House is overdue to declassify this information based on our bill President Biden signed in March.

The American people are tired of being lied to about COVID. https://t.co/PZW6GzSWYb

— Senator Mike Braun (@SenatorBraun) June 22, 2023

“This isn’t optional. It’s the law. Release the intelligence now,” Sen. Josh Hawley also demanded.

Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), the chairman of the select committee on China who sponsored the bill in the House, told the Washington Examiner in an interview that “Congress overwhelmingly passed legislation requiring the administration to declassify all relevant intelligence around the origins of COVID-19.”

“Biden cannot continue to ignore this overwhelming bipartisan consensus” and that “Congress must use every tool at its disposal to enforce this law and ensure the president makes this information available to the public,” the congressman remarked.

Hawley and Braun, who led the way in passing the bill in the Senate, sent a letter to Biden last week “to urge the swift and complete implementation” of the law.

Correct. Which is why @HawleyMO and I passed a law unanimously to do this, but the Biden administration is now 4 days overdue.

Release the report today.https://t.co/Vu4AmBAHQq

— Senator Mike Braun (@SenatorBraun) June 23, 2023

“That deadline, June 18, 2023, is fast approaching,” Hawley and Braun informed the president. “Your Administration has not yet provided any indication of when the relevant material will be declassified.”

The senators told Biden that the law “does not allow for redactions based on your Administration’s view of ‘national security’ broadly defined, as you claimed in your signing statement” but “rather, the Act only provides for much narrower redactions to protect intelligence sources and methods.”

Braun and Hawley warned the Biden administration that it “should comply with the law as written and not undermine clear congressional intent to provide as much transparency to the American people as possible.”

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