DNI Tulsi Gabbard Ends Her Tenure Spreading a Bioweapons Conspiracy

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is promoting a long-disproven conspiracy theory about the U.S. secretly supporting bioweapons manufacturing in Ukraine, just before she leaves her post at the end of the month.

In a video posted on X by her official government account, Tulsi echoed claims that have previously been circulated in Russian propaganda to support Russian military action in Ukraine — and by followers of the QAnon movement as evidence of the “deep state.”

“Until now, evidence regarding the full existence and funding of these laboratories had been knowingly withheld from you, the American people,” Gabbard said in the video, in which she announced the release of documents she claimed supported the theory that the U.S. had secretly funded bioweapons manufacturing in Ukraine.

“This release today breaks new ground as the information surrounding the existence, history, locations and funding of these U.S.-funded bio labs has been intentionally covered up by very powerful people who falsely claimed that these bio labs didn’t exist, that they accuse anyone who says otherwise to be foreign assets and traitors to America,” Gabbard continued.

But the documents released by her office — a total of four pages — appear to rehash already publicly available information about U.S.–supported research facilities in Ukraine.

The first page of the release, which focuses on the Institute of Experimental and Clinical Veterinary Medicine in Kharkiv, even states that the facility’s funding from the Department of Defense was previously public information.

Much of the information contained in the release appears to be drawn from information publicly available on the website of the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine, on a page about the Biological Threat Reduction Program — a long-running U.S. funded program that was created to “reduce legacy threats from nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons left in the Soviet Union’s successor states, including Russia,” according to a 2022 DOD fact sheet.

Gabbard’s office declined to offer further information on where the documents she released came from or whether she was aware that some of them were already public, referring NOTUS back to the press release and Gabbard’s video statement.

Gabbard previously amplified claims of the U.S. supporting bioweapons in Ukraine in 2022. Some Republicans accused her at the time of “parroting Russian propaganda.”

But this is the first time Gabbard has publicly made such claims since becoming DNI. She told the New York Post last month that her office would be investigating biological laboratories abroad for “gain-of-function” research, or research on infectious pathogens that some claim could make them more harmful to humans.

National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya and others within the MAHA movement have claimed that the COVID-19 pandemic started via gain-of-function research in China, a claim that most biosecurity experts deny.

Scientists and experts have previously debunked the claim that the U.S. has funded bioweapons manufacturing in Ukraine, which was promoted by Tucker Carlson on Fox News in 2022. A team from CBS News even visited one of the Ukrainian research facilities at the center of the claims at the time.

Matt Field, a biosecurity editor at the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, said Gabbard’s claims were just “another chapter” of the use of such theories to cast doubt on U.S. research funding abroad.

But, he added, when these theories last surfaced during the Biden administration, “the U.S. government tried to release information about the program and defend it.”

Gabbard said in the video posted on X that ODNI will “continue working closely with partners across the U.S. government to identify exactly where these labs are and what pathogens they contain to end dangerous gain of function research that threatens the health and well-being of the American people and people around the world.”