CBP Had a Border Stop Ready for Peter Daszak. The FBI Made One Call and It Never Happened.

On February 5, 2021, Peter Daszak landed at JFK on a flight from Doha, fresh off the World Health Organization's mission to investigate COVID-19's origins in China. U.S. Customs and Border Protection had a plan for him: a formal targeting event, a Tactical Terrorism Response Team exam, a list of questions about where he'd traveled, who he'd met at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and whether he'd carried or mailed any biological samples out of the country. I read the actual referral. It's specific, methodical, and dated three days before he landed.

It never happened. I've now read the document that says why it never happened, and it raises more questions than it answers.

The CBP referral, filed February 2, 2021, laid out the case for questioning Daszak in plain administrative language: his role as principal investigator on NIH grant R01AI110964, his more-than-fifteen-year collaboration with Wuhan virologist Shi Zhengli, and this line, which CBP's own analysts put in writing: "Much of the funding DASZAK receives is put towards gain of function research." That's not a talking point. That's a federal targeting document.

Two days later, that plan died in one email. A CBP Deputy Chief Officer serving as Joint Terrorism Task Force liaison forwarded a directive to a distribution list of nearly twenty CBP personnel: "Please be advised FBI New York requested we do not stop the subject below." No further explanation. No cited investigation. No stated rationale of any kind. The subject line on the chain reads, simply: "DISREGARD."

I want to be precise about what this document does and doesn't show, because the temptation here runs strong in both directions. It does not show that the FBI was protecting Daszak, running a separate investigation that needed him left alone, or covering anything up. Any of those explanations is consistent with a two-line email that says "do not stop" and nothing else. What the document does show, unambiguously, is that a federal agency built a formal, documented case for questioning a central figure in the COVID-origins investigation at the U.S. border — and a different federal agency killed it by request, without putting a reason in the record CBP kept. Names, offices, and internal routing throughout the release are redacted. The single most important fact in the entire package — why — is not in it.

That's worth sitting with rather than filling in. A federal law enforcement agency intervening to stop a border inspection isn't inherently sinister; the FBI runs active cases it has legitimate reasons to protect, and "do not stop a subject" is a routine instruction when someone is already the subject of separate federal interest. But routine instructions in real investigations usually come with a case number attached somewhere in the file, even in a heavily redacted one. This file has the instruction and not the case number. If there's an innocent explanation — and there may well be one — the document that would show it hasn't been released. Until it is, what's on the record is this: CBP wanted to ask Peter Daszak nine specific questions about Wuhan. The FBI told them not to. Nobody has said why.