Uhh.. did they just figure this out now?

All the other salient points aside, I think this is an example of the interaction between the bubble effect (we here all know it, but it's hard to ascertain just how widespread that awareness is outside this corner of the net) and the misunderstanding of the way such big organs function.

The latter is particularly made worse by how Trump (and others, but I'm not gonna write a whole list) has desensitised us to the scandalous nature of "person with some measure of authority makes throwaway comments".

Big organisations and institutions being "slow" to work or comment such things is an unfortunate side-effect of the fact that they're supposed to put some diligence into their statements. There's probably a nice pile of reports and arguments that have been written, reviewed, refined, discarded, assembled, cross-referenced to support such a statement with not just evidence for that fact, but also for the negative implications that make it a human rights problem. They probably figured it out a while ago, but had to build a case before going public with their results.

Even if we assume the best intentions, the Chief couldn't responsibly "guess" or offer a forecast of where this was gonna go, because his job is to report on facts, not on probabilities*, and those facts have to be established, while all the other work of those organs also is still goiny on. In that light, his statement is tantamount to saying "those doomsayers were right and you should have listened".

Courts have the same issue: you and I and everyone else may know that some person is guilty, but due process demands that they be properly tried and have their guilt proven to a certain standard. That's slow. It's painful to watch. But even in the best circumstances, doing things properly takes time, and doing them quickly risks error.

All of that said, you're probably right that he wasn't in a rush to confirm that, just as courts tend to drag their feet. Corruption makes that issue of delay worse.

* Expressing concerns about potential issues is a little more complex, since it uses extant and studied patterns to show the danger of where a partial match might go, but there was hardly much precedent for a rushing tide of slop pouring into so many households at once to compare to until patterns started emerging that could be observed and matched and eventually coalesce into certainty.