CBS News fired Catherine Herridge in February 2024 and seized her reporting files on the spot.
Now the story they tried to bury just exploded on the Senate floor – confirmed under oath by a CIA officer testifying at great personal risk.
Here is what Herridge knew, what they did to stop her, and what just happened in Congress.
The Reporter They Tried to Silence
When CBS laid off Herridge in February 2024, they didn't just cut her loose.
Network executives seized her files – four large moving boxes of reporting materials, including confidential source information on COVID origins, Hunter Biden, and national security investigations.
Her own colleagues called it "unprecedented."
Herridge refused to go quietly.
She launched her own independent platform, protected her sources, and kept reporting.
By February 5, 2026, she broke an exclusive: credible sources told her that elements of the Intelligence Community, federal law enforcement, and Congress were actively targeting DNI Tulsi Gabbard's Director's Initiatives Group – the internal watchdog Gabbard built to root out CIA politicization – because it was surfacing "uncomfortable facts and findings."
The coordinated pressure, her sources confirmed, was to "disband, dismantle or diminish the impact of the DIG and its work."
Corporate media ignored it.
Then came May 13th.
A CIA Officer Just Said It Under Oath
James Erdman III – a career CIA operations officer – walked into the Senate Homeland Security Committee chamber and confirmed everything Herridge reported.
Under subpoena from Chairman Rand Paul, Erdman testified the CIA illegally monitored the computers and phones of DIG personnel, their active investigations, and their contacts with whistleblowers.
One CIA contractor was fired the day after he spoke with Erdman's investigators.
Erdman's own words to the Senate: "These were Americans being spied upon illegally while executing duties directed by the president and under the authority of the Director of National Intelligence."
He also testified the CIA physically removed 40 boxes of JFK assassination and MKUltra files that Gabbard had been processing for declassification under President Trump's executive order.
https://x.com/C__Herridge/status/2054625558215237974“>https://x.com/C__Herridge/status/2054625558215237974
Sen. Ron Johnson unloaded on the agency's response: "I have years and years and years of built-up frustration of agencies like the CIA, Department of Justice, the FBI, HHS snubbing our oversight, giving us the big middle finger."
Fauci Is at the Center of All of It
The illegal spying was only part of what Erdman told Congress.
He testified that CIA scientific analysts concluded – multiple times between 2021 and 2023 – that COVID-19 most likely came from a lab leak in Wuhan.
Every time, management buried it.
In August 2021, the agency was preparing to call it a lab leak.
Five days later the conclusion flipped – and the CIA refused to show Erdman's team why.
A 2022 internal review had eight of ten analysts leaning toward lab leak, including six of seven scientific experts.
Management rewrote the conclusion to say the agency could not identify the origin "precisely" – a word Erdman testified analysts don't use, calling it the language of someone trying to end discussion rather than reach one.
At the center of the suppression was Anthony Fauci.
Fauci – whose agency funded gain-of-function coronavirus research at the Wuhan lab – inserted himself into CIA deliberations, steering investigators toward a curated list of scientists who had already dismissed the lab-leak theory and had financial ties to the very research under scrutiny.
When Rand Paul asked Erdman whether anyone ever raised Fauci's conflict of interest inside the CIA, Erdman answered: "No."
Sen. Josh Hawley told Fox News after the testimony: Fauci helped fund the Wuhan lab, backed gain-of-function research, then worked to cover up COVID's origins from the American people.
Multiple Republican senators called for criminal prosecution.
Seven Democrats Couldn't Be Bothered to Show Up
Congress unanimously passed a law requiring the release of all COVID origins intelligence.
Biden's ODNI director handed over five pages and told Sen. Hawley that was everything the government had.
Erdman testified Gabbard's team was working through more than 2,000 pages the CIA had been sitting on.
Hawley's response on the floor: "Our government is no longer a democracy."
Not one Senate Democrat attended the hearing.
All seven Democratic members of Rand Paul's committee – including ranking member Gary Peters of Michigan – skipped sworn testimony from an active CIA officer alleging a multi-year cover-up of the deadliest pandemic in a century.
Johnson told Erdman directly: "I just wish our Democrat colleagues had any level of curiosity about what's happening inside the deep state."
CBS seized Herridge's files, dragged her into court, and tried to make her burn her sources.
She went independent, kept reporting, and in February broke the story that the CIA was hunting the very investigators trying to expose the cover-up.
Twelve weeks later, a CIA officer confirmed it under oath before the United States Senate.
That's not just a vindication.
That's a verdict.
Sources:
- Catherine Herridge, "EXCLUSIVE: Credible sources tell me that elements of the Intelligence Community have targeted @DNIGabbard's Director's Initiative Group," X (formerly Twitter), February 5, 2026.
- Catherine Herridge, "As early as February, I began receiving credible reporting that @DNIGabbard's investigative team was being tracked," X (formerly Twitter), May 13, 2026.
- Chad Pergram and Jamie Joseph, "Top 4 explosive moments from CIA whistleblower's testimony on alleged COVID-19 lab leak cover-up," Fox News, May 14, 2026.
- Matt Vespa, "Why the CIA Was Not Pleased With Yesterday's COVID Whistleblower Hearing," Townhall, May 14, 2026.
- Daily Signal Staff, "The CIA Failed Americans During the COVID-19 Pandemic," The Daily Signal, May 14, 2026.
- Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, "Chairman Paul Delivers Opening Remarks During Whistleblower Hearing on the Multi-Agency Cover-Up of COVID-19," May 13, 2026.
