MSNBC analyst John Heilemann appeared to make a stunning reversal on "Real Time" host Bill Maher during a panel discussion about the COVID lab-leak theory.
Maher took a victory lap on Friday after FBI Director Christopher Wray and the U.S. Department of Energy revealed they believe a lab leak out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology is the most likely origin of the pandemic, telling the panel the COVID "dissenters" who strayed away from various narratives at the time are "looking pretty good."
"How could it not be a possibility?" Maher wondered. "It's a lab in Wuhan where the virus started that studied the virus and was doing gain-of-function research on the virus. How could it not be?"
"I agree with you," Heilemann responded. "The lab was always a thing where it could have been, where it could have come from… but I will say if you go back to that time, why did people seize on the notion that they'll reject the lab leak theory? Because like everything else in COVID, Donald Trump politicized it from day one."
"Whether it was a lab leak or whether it was a wet market, can we all agree that likely it was an accident?" Heilemann later added.
Except he appeared to take a different tone in May 2020.
Appearing on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," Heilemann was asked about the comments made by then-President Trump, who had touted the lab-leak theory and speculated whether the leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology was accidental or on purpose. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence at the time had released a statement saying the intel community believed COVID "was not manmade or genetically modified."
BILL MAHER SAYS COVID ‘DISSENTERS’ ARE ‘LOOKING PRETTY GOOD’ FOLLOWING LAB LEAK THEORY DEVELOPMENTS
Heilemann suspected that Trump was up to something "sinister" based on a Washington Post report.
"There is kind of a systematic effort to try to kind of push the intelligence community to find evidence to support this theory, this conspiracy theory," Heilemann told his colleague Joe Scarborough. "And, you know, we've seen that not just in the Trump administration but in the Bush administration, other administrations where a politically predetermined outcome ends up putting pressure- it's applied to the intelligence community and pressure is put on them."
The MSNBC analyst went on to declare that Trump is "divorced from the facts" and touted the ODNI statement as a "public rebuke" of the so-called "conspiracy theory" being pushed by the then-president.
"Donald Trump has been super disdainful of the intelligence community, but I'll tell you when his disdain will stop. His disdain will stop if he can get it to start doing things for him that is that he finds politically helpful," Heilemann said. "And certainly pinning something on China that would be a made up but politically opportune development is something he would love to see as he heads towards re-election, to be able to kind of have some kind of supposedly fact-based evidence that he can say hey, China actually did this and it was more nefarious than we previously thought."
Neither Heilemann nor MSNBC responded to Fox News Digital's requests for comment.
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Much of the legacy media collectively dismissed the lab-leak theory during its coverage of the COVID pandemic. Many outlets were forced to issue corrections after U.S. agencies began embracing the theory as the likely origin of the virus.
Fox News Digital reported Monday that then-CNN president Jeff Zucker ordered his staff not to chase down the lab-leak theory since he deemed it to be a "Trump talking point," according to a CNN insider.
