Does Hersh have a "live one" on COVID, Trump 1.0 and WIV, or was he set up?

Or, as my Substack note said about Seymour Hersh's paywalled piece last week:

Does Sy Hersh have a live fish here, or did some winger bait his hook with a dead minnow, like with Butowsky (and people behind him) and Seth Rich, for which Sy remains largely unrepentant, AFAIK?

And, let's dive in, and I'll link to old Blogger pieces about Sy, too. The nutgraf, quoted in full, is the second paragraph and the last before the paywall:

I learned this week that a US intelligence asset at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, where the Covid virus was first observed, is safe and out of danger. The asset, highly regarded within the CIA, was recruited while in graduate school in the United States and provided early warning of a laboratory accident at Wuhan that led to a series of infections that was quickly spreading and initially seemed immune to treatment. As is the case today, many senior US officials were reluctant to tell the president what he did not want to hear. But early studies dealing with how to mitigate the oncoming plague, based on information from the Chinese health ministry about the lethal new virus, were completed late in 2019 by experts from America’s National Institutes of Health and other research agencies. Despite their warnings, a series of preventative actions were not taken until the United States was flooded with cases of the virus. All of these studies, I have been told, have been expunged from the official internal records in Washington, including any mention of the CIA's source inside the Chinese laboratory. It was a cover-up to protect a president who did not do the right thing.

OK, more analysis, stemming from my note.

First, per the Butowsky link, there's a possibility that Hersh is a willing fellow traveler, and as part of that, there's some axes he has to grind, unbeknownst to me what they are. Or maybe this is firing a shot across Trump's bow in some way. (He's not paying attention to you, Sy.)

Let's start with Sy's first piece, after his "hello world" one, on Substack, about the Nord Stream pipeline demolition, and my take on it.

I said there that, even if the big picture was right, he got a lot of details wrong. I also added that, if nothing else, he may have gotten "Fisked." (That said, as with the late Robert Fisk, that happens more easily if the journalist is a willing dance partner.) 

I also noted Mark Ames, and Bernhard at Moon of Alabama, as too willing to give Sy blank checks. In fact, since I've had run-ins with Bernard and MOA before, I wrote a separate brief call-out. Related to Ames? I noted that Sy's piece — and Mark's Radio War Nerd about it — had brought plenty of nutters out of the woodwork, many related to Julian Assange in general, and Seth Rich in particular.

Rather than being Fisked, as another option, I wondered back then if Sy was ax-grinding. Possible on this issue as well. (Trump ain't listening.)

As far as Sy's past? Yes, he got My Lai right. And other things. He was totally wrong about Obama's Abbottabad raid on Osama bin Laden, and perhaps in part either due to ax-grinding, being Fisked, or both.

And, long ago, Sy's "The Dark Side of Camelot," per my linked review, was as much, if not more, miss than hit, and some of the misses were straight-on laughable.

So, sorry, Sy and/or minders? No desire to "claim my free post" and be spammed or something. It's not worth it to figure out whether this is more a Fisking or more an ax-grinding piece, and I'm confident that it's NOT more a "reality" piece.