Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is working to declassify records related to the COVID-19 pandemic and Havana syndrome before she leaves the administration at the end of June, an Office of the Director of National Intelligence 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 push classified material through whatever review process stands between the intelligence community's vaults and the public.
The move touches two of the most contested intelligence questions of the past decade: what the U.S. government knew about the origins of the virus that killed more than a million Americans, and whether a foreign adversary targeted American personnel with a directed-energy weapon. On both fronts, the federal government has spent years offering the public incomplete answers, or none at all.
The unnamed ODNI official framed the effort in direct terms:
"DNI Gabbard is actively working to declassify information about the COVID-19 pandemic and Anomalous Health Incidents before June 30."
The statement did not specify which documents or categories of intelligence Gabbard intends to release, nor did it describe the internal review steps required. Those gaps matter. Declassification in the intelligence community is rarely a single signature, it typically involves equities reviews across multiple agencies, any one of which can slow or block a release.
Gabbard announced her resignation from the intelligence chief role recently, citing her husband's rare bone cancer diagnosis as the reason for stepping down. That personal timeline now overlaps with an institutional one: whether the documents see daylight before she walks out the door.
Public interest in the intelligence community's knowledge of COVID-19's origins has burned since 2020. The Wuhan Institute of Virology, a high-security lab with ties to the Chinese military, sat at the geographic center of the outbreak. Anthony Fauci's institute at the National Institutes of Health directed money to that same lab for coronavirus engineering research.
Congress acted in 2023, unanimously passing a law requiring the declassification of intelligence related to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Unanimously. Both parties, both chambers. That kind of consensus in Washington is vanishingly rare, and it reflected a bipartisan judgment that the public deserved to see what the intelligence agencies knew.
What happened next was less impressive. President Joe Biden's intelligence chief, Avril Haines, responded to the law by releasing a brief summary report. Not the underlying intelligence. Not the full analytical product. A summary.
That gap between what Congress demanded and what the Biden administration delivered is now at the center of a whistleblower's account. CIA whistleblower James Erdman III testified before the Senate in May that some within the intelligence community had suppressed evidence of a lab accident in Wuhan, China. Erdman said he reviewed thousands of pages of material that Haines never released.
Erdman also told the Senate that Fauci connected the intelligence community to preferred scientists in order to advance the theory that the virus emerged naturally, a claim that, if the underlying documents support it, would represent a serious breach of the firewall between scientific inquiry and intelligence analysis. That testimony remains Erdman's account; the documents he described have not been made public.
The question Gabbard's declassification effort could answer is straightforward: do the thousands of pages Erdman described exist, and what do they say? If Haines sat on material that Congress ordered released, that is not a policy disagreement. It is defiance of a unanimous act of Congress.
Gabbard's tenure as DNI was not without its own friction over access to sensitive intelligence material. Her office clashed with the CIA over a separate document dispute that drew public attention earlier in her time as intelligence chief.
The second category of records Gabbard is targeting involves Anomalous Health Incidents, the clinical term for what the public knows as Havana syndrome. The symptoms were first reported in 2016 by a CIA officer stationed at the U.S. embassy in Havana, Cuba. Officials have described a cluster of symptoms including cognitive difficulties, dizziness, and headaches. NIH studies found severe symptoms but no evidence of MRI-detectable brain injury or biological abnormalities, a result that deepened the mystery rather than resolving it.
A declassified intelligence assessment from January 2025 revealed a split within the intelligence community itself. Five agencies assessed that Havana syndrome was "very unlikely" to be caused by a foreign actor. But one agency assessed that it was "likely" a foreign actor had developed a novel weapon capable of causing some of the reported symptoms. Another agency put the odds at roughly 50-50.
That is not a consensus. That is a community divided on a question with direct implications for the safety of American intelligence officers, diplomats, and their families. The Government Accountability Office has noted that Americans affected by these mysterious symptoms may struggle to get care, a bureaucratic insult layered on top of an unresolved security question.
The public has been told, in effect, that most agencies think nothing happened, but at least one agency thinks an adversary built a weapon and used it on American personnel. Those two positions cannot both be right. The underlying intelligence that produced those competing conclusions has never been released.
Gabbard's departure raises an immediate institutional question: who follows her, and will that person continue the declassification push? President Trump named housing chief Bill Pulte as acting intelligence director to replace Gabbard, though the president has since indicated that Pulte will not serve as the permanent intelligence director amid Senate resistance.
That leadership vacuum matters for the declassification timeline. An acting director with an uncertain tenure and no Senate confirmation may lack the institutional leverage, or the inclination, to force reluctant agencies to hand over sensitive material. If Gabbard does not finish the job before June 30, there is no guarantee her successor will pick it up.
The stakes are not abstract. On COVID origins, the classified material could confirm or undercut the whistleblower's account that intelligence pointing toward a lab accident was deliberately suppressed. It could show whether Fauci's reported involvement in steering intelligence community contacts toward favored scientists was a casual introduction or a coordinated effort to shape an analytical conclusion. It could reveal what the Biden-era ODNI chose to withhold from Congress and why.
On Havana syndrome, the documents could explain why one agency reached a fundamentally different conclusion than five others. They could identify the foreign actor that one agency assessed was "likely" responsible. They could show whether the majority assessment, "very unlikely", rested on a genuine analytical consensus or on institutional reluctance to acknowledge that American personnel were attacked on the job.
Gabbard herself reportedly pushed back on the administration over surveillance authorities during her tenure, suggesting she was willing to take positions that put her at odds with the intelligence establishment. Whether that independent streak extends to overriding agency objections on declassification in her final weeks remains to be seen.
The broader pattern here is familiar. Congress demands transparency. The intelligence community offers a fraction of what was requested. The public waits. Officials retire or rotate out. The moment passes. The files stay sealed.
The 2023 declassification law passed without a single dissenting vote. Haines responded with a summary. Erdman says thousands of pages remain hidden. And now a departing DNI has twenty-five days to do what the previous administration declined to do over the course of years.
Whether Gabbard can actually deliver is an open question. The ODNI official's statement confirms intent but not completion. Declassification is a process, not a press release, and agencies with equities in these programs have every institutional incentive to slow-walk the review.
But the effort itself is worth noting. A unanimous act of Congress was treated as optional by the last administration. A CIA whistleblower says evidence was suppressed. Intelligence officers reported debilitating symptoms, and the community that employs them cannot agree on whether anyone attacked them.
The American public funded the research, bore the pandemic, and sent those officers into the field. They have waited long enough to see what their own government knows.
