Newly released documents show CBP flagged EcoHealth Alliance president Peter Daszak as an extremely high person of interest returning from China in 2021, then the FBI told border agents to let him walk.
Customs and Border Protection built a full targeting file on Peter Daszak ahead of his February 5, 2021 arrival at JFK Airport, planning to question him and search his belongings the moment he stepped off the plane. He never got the interview. Three days before he landed, the FBI's New York Field Office told CBP to stand down, according to documents released this week by Sen. Rand Paul, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
Daszak was flying home from Wuhan, where he had just spent weeks as part of the World Health Organization's mission to investigate the origins of COVID-19. CBP's National Targeting Center did not flag him lightly. The agency cited his more than fifteen years of collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and his role as principal investigator on National Institutes of Health grants that funneled money to bat coronavirus research inside China, according to the documents Paul's office published. Agents scheduled a Tactical Terrorism Response Team exam, the kind of stop typically reserved for national security concerns, intending to ask Daszak about his contacts at the Wuhan lab and whether he was carrying biological samples.
Then the request came down from the FBI: do not stop the subject. The inspection was scrapped. Daszak walked through customs untouched, according to Fox News, which confirmed the documents alongside the Daily Caller.
The documents do not say why the FBI intervened. They do not identify which official signed the request, and they offer no indication whether the bureau interviewed Daszak through some other channel, was protecting a separate investigation, or simply decided a research partner was not worth the friction. Paul's office says the paper trail ends at the request itself. That is the trouble with a stand-down order dropped into a file with no justification attached: it invites the very suspicion it should have prevented.
Daszak has long been a central figure in the lab-leak debate. EcoHealth Alliance funneled federal grant money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for years before the pandemic, and Daszak organized a February 2020 letter in The Lancet dismissing the lab-leak theory as a conspiracy, a letter later shown to have been coordinated in part by his own organization. His group's federal funding was suspended in 2020 and again drew scrutiny from congressional investigators in the years since. Neither Daszak nor EcoHealth Alliance has issued a public response to this week's document release.
A courier, three vials, and a second stop three years later
The same records also revive a separate episode that has drawn less attention until now. In November 2018, CBP officers at Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport intercepted a courier carrying three undeclared vials concealed inside paper towels and wax film. The courier told agents the vials came from Yusen Zhou, a researcher tied to China's Academy of Military Medical Sciences, and that they were bound for Fang Li, a University of Minnesota virologist who had co-authored papers with Zhou. Lab testing by DHS and the FBI later confirmed the vials contained porcine epidemic diarrhea virus spike protein material, according to the documents.
The same courier turned up again at the same airport in June 2021, this time carrying 132 vials and a laptop that belonged to someone else, headed the other direction out of China. CBP has said those vials likely held a fly species used in biology labs rather than anything more alarming, and the full scope of that shipment's contents has not been independently confirmed beyond CBP's own account. Paul has said the pattern suggests researchers were moving material outside normal channels specifically to dodge scrutiny, though he stopped short of tying the courier directly to the Daszak episode.
What ties the two threads together is simpler than any single lab result: a federal system built to flag exactly this kind of risk worked as designed at the border, and was overridden anyway. CBP's targeting center did its job. The stand-down came from above it.
Paul's committee has signaled more documents are coming. Whether the FBI will explain who ordered agents to let a high-priority national security stop go unexamined, and why, is now the question hanging over an origins debate that Washington spent years insisting was settled.
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