RedState has exclusively reported since June 4 that a high-ranking member of the Chinese government we now know to be Dong Jingwei, the country’s top counterintelligence official, defected to the United States. Multiple sources within the US intelligence community who receive briefings on the matter told RedState details about Dong’s defection (as reported here) and that officials at the Defense Intelligence Agency have high confidence in the information Dong has provided, including information showing that the Wuhan Institute of Virology is in fact a military bioweapons research lab completely controlled by the People’s Liberation Army and that the virus we now know as SARS-CoV-2 was engineered in the Wuhan lab. Information from that defector was used by an expert virologist and a scientist formerly with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in conjunction with previously available public information about the virus’s genome, to independently determine that the virus was engineered.

Despite flippant dismissals from the former spook community and attempts by the Chinese Communist Party to deflect and spread misinformation (claiming Dong led a seminar in Beijing on Friday), tonight a top expert on China, Gordon Chang, appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight saying that he believed that Dong has in fact defected, backing up RedState’s reporting.

Rumors suggest the Chinese Vice Minister of State Security defected to the U.S. and gave up info on the true origins of the coronavirus. Is this true? Tucker Carlson and Gordon Chang weigh in. pic.twitter.com/XIl8CaxIHB

— (((Jason Rantz))) on KTTH Radio (@jasonrantz) June 22, 2021

Of course, the government still hasn’t officially confirmed that Dong has defected and is in the United States, but Chang’s confidence is a good sign.

Even Spy Talk, which paywalled their first story on the matter, filed an update today – slamming RedState first, though:

Widespread rumors that China’s top counterintelligence official had defected to the United States last February reached a fever pitch over the weekend, propelled largely by unfounded reports in anticommunist and pro-Trump circles that Dong had brought with him evidence that the Covid-19 pandemic had originated in a leak from a virology lab in Wuhan, not from an animal source.

For a lesson in repeating propaganda, read the Spy Talk piece. It’s cringeworthily pro-communist.