Lab leak is not a debunked conspiracy theory and never has been

The truth is we’ll just never know

The Department of Energy is not the first agency that comes to mind when most people think about America’s Intelligence Community. But as many an Energy Secretary has discovered to their chagrin, the DOE generally plays second fiddle to the Interior Department in terms of what most people think of as “energy policy.” Interior controls the vast federal lands of the American West that are the site of so much of our oil and gas drilling. These same broad vistas are also some of the best locations for utility-scale wind and solar projects and where, with appropriate regulatory changes, we could potentially unlock vast stores of geothermal energy.

Where DOE is truly the undisputed king is the realm of nuclear weapons and related research and science.

And because nuclear weapons are very much the kind of thing that spies are interested in, the DOE has a small but robust Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, whose “distinctive contribution to national security is the ability to lev…