What Did DoD Know, And When Did They Know It?

One of the most disturbing revelations in recent days regarding US funding of Gain Of Function research at China's Wuhan labs is the fact that some of the funding may have come from the US military. The UK Daily Mail reported last Friday--and for some reason refers to the non-profit EcoHealth Alliance as a "charity":

The Pentagon gave $39 million to a charity that funded controversial coronavirus research at a Chinese lab accused of being the source for Covid-19, federal data reveals.

The news comes as the charity's chief, British-born scientist Dr. Peter Daszak, was exposed in an alleged conflict of interest and back-room campaign to discredit lab leak theories.

The charity, EcoHealth Alliance (EHA), has come under intense scrutiny after it emerged that it had been using federal grants to fund research into coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.

The U.S. nonprofit, set up to research new diseases, has also partly funded deeply controversial 'gain of function' experiments, where dangerous viruses are made more infectious to study their effect on human cells.

A political storm broke when former president Donald Trump canceled a $3.7 million grant to the charity last year amid claims that Covid-19 was created in, or leaked from, the Wuhan lab funded by EHA.

But federal grant data assembled by independent researchers shows that the charity has received more than $123 million from the government – from 2017 to 2020 - and that one of its biggest funders is the Department of Defense, funneling almost $39 million to the organization since 2013.

Exactly how much of that money went toward research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology is unknown.

Fair enough. We can't be absolutely, 100% positive, that a single dime of that $39 million worth of DoD money went towards GOF research in Wuhan. If I were a betting man, however, my bet would be that a considerable portion of that money did go to Wuhan--possibly all of it.

Was The Military Stand-Down A Good Idea?

Right, so we're talking about the first initiative Lloyd Austin undertook as SecDef, after stepping down from the boards of Raytheon, Nucor, and Tenet Healthcare. Even before purging defense advisory boards of Trump appointees, Austin announced a 60-day stand-down to train service members to "recognize and combat" "extremism" in the military--which is the current euphemism for white conservatives. Or, to be fair, conservatives of any color, because conservativism is a simply a proxy for "whiteness", no matter what color you happen to be. Or so I hear.

Good idea, bad idea? Like so many things in life, that all depends on what you were hoping to accomplish. If the great idea was to transform the enlisted men and women into woke robots, early reports suggest that the stand-down has been a signal failure. It seems the enlisted types--the kind of people who will never be asked to join corporate boards--follow the news and--horrors!--think for themselves. And they're not buying the idea that the January 6 Event was staged by White Supremacists while the months and months of violent BLM and Antifa rioting were actually peaceful--except for a handful of opportunistic criminals, totally unconnected to Leftist ideology. The trainers are doing their best, but it seems the reeducation isn't taking hold.

So, from the standpoint of the Left, the stand-down is looking like a failure, but it may also be turning out--again, from their perspective--to be a Bad Idea to begin with.

Management types will often tell you that getting the little people--worker bee types, or enlisted people in the military--to talk about things can lead to trouble. What often happens is that an Us against Them mentality takes hold--Us being the workers or enlisted people, and Them being management. The lower level types discover that they're not just a lot of isolated individuals. In fact, they learn that many of the doubts and grievances regarding management are shared widely. An Us v. Them dynamic which equates to something like Enlisted v. Officers can lead to big trouble.

So, Zerohedge reported as follows, Defiant US Soldiers From Every Echelon of the Military Openly Questioning Why BLM Riots Weren’t Treated Like Capitol ‘Insurrection’, drawing on an article from Military.com:

UPDATED: BREAKING: Glenn Fine Out As DoD IG

This is really very big. You need to understand that Glenn Fine is sort of an institution in the the DC world of Inspectors General. He was there at the beginning and has a great reputation in the Establishment. He was IG at DoJ when I was interviewed in connection with the Hanssen case--in which there was no real accountability. At this point I don't know what's behind this move. It's quite possible that it has to do with Durham's ongoing investigation and the involvement of DoD personnel in the Dem Impeachment Theater. I'm sure we'll be hearing more.

On the other hand, ponder this from Wikipedia:

On March 30, 2020, Fine was named chair of The Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, to oversee the $2 trillion stimulus funds signed into law by President Donald Trump in response to the coronavirus outbreak. On April 7, 2020, Fine was removed from the position by President Trump.

Did Trump learn something about who Fine was cooperating with in that new Pandemic position? Here's how this move worked, as you'll see from the AP account below.

DoJ IG Michael Horowitz chairs the IG council--all the IGs in DC. With formation of the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee Horowitz moved quickly to appoint Fine to head The Pandemic committee on March 30, 2020. Trump moved just as quickly to nominate a replacement inspector general at the Pentagon and appointed an acting one to serve in Fine’s place. Then, today, Trump dismissed Fine from his newfangled Pandemic position. It was a sort of Wuhan Firedrill, and now Fine has no place to sit--or to hang his hat. He'll return to DoD, but will be second fiddle to the new acting guy.

There's no way in the world that Trump didn't have this in mind, and there's no way in the world he didn't consult closely with his WH counsel, Pat Cipollone, who led the impeachment defense team. And quite likely with AG Barr as well. I have to believe that this ties in to the ongoing house cleaning of the Intelligence Community.