Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Public Affairs Director Liz Lyons didn’t wait for whistleblower James Erdman to deliver his bombshell “COVID cover-up” testimony before the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee (SHSGAC) on May 13 before issuing an extraordinarily unusual and blistering condemnation of the panel.

“The committee acted in bad faith by subpoenaing an agency officer for testimony today without notifying CIA, despite having already obtained closed-door testimony from the individual previously. The witness testifying today is not appearing as a whistleblower in pursuit of the truth, but instead in response to the subpoena issued by Chairman [Rand] Paul. This proceeding amounts to nothing more than dishonest political theater masquerading as a congressional hearing. As the CIA has already assessed, COVID-19 most likely originated from a lab leak, and efforts to undermine that conclusion are disingenuous,” Lyons declared.

In his testimony, Erdman, a career operations officer with the intelligence agency at the center of efforts early in the COVID pandemic and continuing throughout the four years of former President Joe Biden’s administration, told the committee that an internal investigative group assessed as early as 2021 that COVID originated in a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. But senior Biden administration officials subsequently altered the group’s report to attach a “low probability” assessment to the lab leak and to emphasize instead the likelihood of a transmission to humans from bat meat sold at a nearby outdoor meat market.

Erdman also pointed repeatedly in his testimony to former National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Anthony Fauci as masterminding efforts within federal public health agencies and closely aligned academic communities — and in coordination with top CIA officials — to reject the lab leak theory and back the meat market transmission theory.

It is important to note that Congress approved and Biden signed into law the COVID-19 Origin Act of 2023, a measure directing the intelligence community to release to the public all documents regarding the origin of the virus. Knowledgeable sources have told The Washington Stand that there are least 2,000 pages of such documents that are essential to understanding how the virus spread worldwide from China — but only five pages were released in a June 23, 2024 report by then- Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Avril Hanes under Biden. The non-disclosure has continued under Trump as Ratcliffe’s CIA has failed to release additional documents to the public.

During the hearing, Chairman Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who heads the committee’s Permanent Investigations Subcommittee, angrily responded to Lyons’s accusations of bad faith and staging political theater. Paul declared that public hearings like the one featuring Erdman “are congressional oversight.” Johnson demanded that CIA Director John Ratcliffe and “this person” [Lyons] must “apologize to the chairman and this committee.” Committee member Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) similarly demanded that Ratcliffe “denounce and rescind” Lyons’s statement.

Agency spokesmen typically only flay congressional committees when they are controlled by the opposition party, but all of the main players in what has become an impassioned behind-the-scenes drama as a result of Lyons’s statement are Republicans, including Paul, Johnson, and Lee, as well as Ratcliffe, the former Texas Republican congressman. Ratcliffe, it should be noted, is the only person ever in American history to serve as CIA chief, as well as DNI.

Lyons also boasts a career working in multiple high-level jobs, beginning as a Regional Finance Coordinator for former Florida Governor Jeb Bush’s unsuccessful 2016 presidential campaign. She has also served in numerous sensitive high-level White House positions in both of President Donald Trump’s terms in the Oval Office, including special assistant to the president/policy adviser during the first Trump term. Lyons is also an experienced Capitol Hill hand, having served for nearly two years as communications director for the House Oversight and Accountability Committee’s Select Coronavirus Pandemic Subcommittee under Rep. Brad Wenstrup.

In other words, Lyons’s public bashing of the Senate committee should not be dismissed as a rookie mistake. The CIA media office did not respond to TWS’s request to speak to Lyons or for any other information in connection with her statement or the Erdman hearing.

Knowledgeable congressional sources tell TWS that no apology has been received from anybody at the intelligence agency, and it could not be learned if Ratcliffe or Lyons have communicated directly with Paul, Johnson, Lee or other members of the homeland security committee regarding the controversy. The White House press office did not respond to TWS’s request for comment.

What is clear, however, is Lyons’s brutal critique of the committee shocked and angered Republican insiders on Capitol Hill and former senior GOP executive branch appointees in multiple Republican presidential administrations. Because the controversy involves the senior levels of the intelligence community, as well as highly visible and influential Republican lawmakers and key staffers, all of those interviewed for this article demanded anonymity.

Asked if anything Erdman told the hearing came as a surprise, one of the major players in the COVID odyssey said, “What was disappointing [and] sad was that the CIA felt it had to make a statement, the press person of the CIA had to make a statement, which I found unacceptable. They have to either really hold that person accountable, or Ratcliffe needs to distance himself from that statement or be held accountable for the inappropriateness. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was blindsided by that statement.”

The same source suggested that Lyons did not act “on her own, she’s not a radical, but someone put her up to it. But she has the problem, and the CIA was off the reservation throughout the COVID Pandemic. … They were probably very knowledgeable about what was going on in Wuhan, and it made no sense to me the way they played up the [meat market] theory.”

Another veteran of previous Republican presidential administrations, who handled congressional relations for a Cabinet-level department and a major independent agency, told TWS that he had “never seen anything like Lyons’s attack on a powerful Senate oversight committee chaired and staffed by men and women friendly to the administration. This is even more puzzling in that CIA Director Ratcliffe raised the very same concerns about the agency in previous congressional testimony himself. Congressional or public affairs officers rarely go rogue. This episode is beyond mysterious.”

Erdman told the committee that his testimony had not been pre-cleared by CIA officials, and he expressed concern about the likelihood of official retaliation against him in response to his public testimony. He told the committee that he had taken time off following his closed-door testimony. Since he’s returned to the office, “They’ve been talking to me about what comes next.”

Multiple federal laws and regulations are intended to protect whistleblowing federal workers, but CIA employees are not covered by the same protections that apply to career civil servants. All CIA job applicants are required to submit to top security background investigation and a polygraph test as a precondition for being hired and thereafter to maintain employment status.

Even with numerous laws and regulations aimed at protecting government whistleblowers, retaliation against them can often be all but impossible to prove. A whistleblower can, for example, be transferred to new duties for which they may not be adequately trained, then demoted for failure to perform satisfactorily — or their duties are reduced in order to encourage a resignation. In other cases, the whistleblower can be ordered to a new duty station that is inconvenient or requires relocation. And in the case of intelligence community employees, the exceptions to the career civil service protections make retaliatory firings much easier.

Mindful of these realities, Paul and Johnson put Ratcliffe on notice the day after the hearing, saying in a letter obtained by TWS that “the Committee received testimony from James E. Erdman III, a Senior Operations Officer at the Central Intelligence Agency, who appeared pursuant to a subpoena issued by the Committee on May 5, 2026. This letter serves as formal notice that we expect no retaliatory action of any kind to be taken against Mr. Erdman in connection with his appearance before the Committee.”

Paul and Johnson also informed Ratcliffe that they were enclosing “a copy of the written testimony submitted to the Committee by Mr. Erdman. We ask that you personally review it in full, as Mr. Erdman testified under oath to a pattern of deeply troubling conduct occurring within the Central Intelligence Agency,” and that “a copy of this letter is also being transmitted to the Inspector General (IG) of the Intelligence Community.”