will you pledge to release the report in
seoul after 90 days
uh yes that's unless there's something
i'm unaware of
the u.s side does not care about facts
or truths nor is it interested in
serious scientific
origin tracing but wants to use a
pandemic to engage in stigmatization and
political manipulation
and to shirk its responsibility the data
disproportionately stacked up as we
investigated that it was coming out of a
lab or some
supernatural source to say this came out
of a zoonotic
situation is sort of ridiculous
well the president says 90 days now 89
for this
this investigation into the origins of
the coronavirus meantime what had
changed from the beginning until now
and what comes next let's bring in our
panel ben dominic publisher of the
federalist
morgan ortegas former state department
spokesperson and maura lionson national
political correspondent of national
public radio
morgan we should caveat obviously you
were part of the trump administration
back in those days
at the end when the coronavirus origins
were a big part of this as you see this
develop
what's your perspective so the last few
days of the administration we were
working on releasing the document that
that everyone saw publicly
and there was a very intense
declassification effort to make sure
that we could
get this information out it's important
to note that nothing re-released really
wasn't anything different
than what mike pompeo and others have
been saying for a year which was there
was no smoking gun on any particular
theory
but that we all had a lot of skepticism
about whatever the chinese communist
party's
first excuses or what whatever their
first theory is
of the case the chinese communist party
at every turn has
stopped independent investigations in
fact when you look beyond the united
states when you look at australia
they dared last year to simply call for
an independent investigation
and the chinese communist party and
enacted trade retributions against them
for doing so and they have silenced one
by one every critic
uh starting especially with the who uh
the who parroted chinese talking points
for uh for over a year they've had
they've already had one
investigation that the whole world had
to admit wasn't credible i don't know
how anyone could trust them to have
another one that would be critical
and the loser of this is everybody the
six hundred 000 americans that died
of covet and everyone around the world
who has suffered because we will never
be able to
fully stop the next pandemic without
understanding the true origins of this
one
and the chinese communist party has shut
that down over the past year
they likely have destroyed evidence and
we may never know
at the beginning when the administration
the last one put out that white paper
uh mara obviously there was a lot of
talk about talk of that being a
conspiracy theory and where
the media collectively was take a listen
the wuhan institute of virology was made
famous by these
trump officials who allege without much
concrete evidence that the covet virus
leaked from the labs in as a facility
certainly pinning something on china
that would be a a made-up but
but but but politically opportune uh
development is something he would love
to see the world health organization
says this lab
leak theory is extremely unlikely that
office
said they weren't sure yet that they
were still investigating it and so
the president's winging it just like he
wings it every day on china i think the
conclusion
at this stage is that there are an awful
lot of people with a lot of theories
and not a lot of evidence and seem to
jump on now there's this kind of
change in that you a lot of people are
saying well they were saying it was a
bio weapon
that's not what was being said at the
time no no
the two theories that have been around
the whole time
was one that it was some kind of animal
to human contact maybe in one of these
chinese wet markets
where people buy certain kinds of
wildlife or
that it was a lab accident where
there was a facility in wuhan that was
investigating researching these kinds of
viruses
the problem is that the chinese have not
been cooperative
u.s officials have testified to that in
both administrations they haven't been
transparent so it's going to be really
hard to figure out
the origin of the virus but
we do know that that the biden
administration after kind of saying that
the w.h.o
should be the lead investigator on this
has changed its mind
and now biden has given the intelligence
community 90 days to see if they can
figure out
if it was animal to human contact or a
language
i think they changed because there's
perhaps new evidence we had that wall
street journal story about three
researchers who got sick but that was in
the white paper put out they seemed to
have had trouble administering yeah
yeah well i think that they just feel
that they
there's more likelihood now that it
might be a lab accident they want to see
if they can figure that out yeah
and they should well here's the next
question is if it
comes to pass ben what the punishment
should be take a listen
would the president seek to punish china
we're not going to
go there just yet we have to go through
the 90
day review and once we have the 90-day
review we'll be able to reassess
we could take away their most favored
nation trading status one of the things
they covet most
we could revoke their status at the
world bank in which they get special
loans
uh from the world bank we could take
away all of the visas of chinese
communist party officials
and their children who they love to send
to american schools
it seems pretty far-fetched to think
that the buy administration is going
down the tom cotton road
no matter what they find at the end of
90 days ben
regardless of whether you agree with tom
cotton's approach or not i happen to in
this instance
i do think this is a situation that
really uh is only happening
because we've had this shift in power
because frankly we knew
all of these different elements you know
thanks in part to the team that morgan
was a part of
you know months ago and to me the fact
that it took this long
for facebook for instance come out today
and say we will now allow people to
openly discuss this after you saw
so many people who were shut down
silenced you know had their videos taken
off of youtube
weren't able to discuss this in a way
that would have been beneficial i think
to the public conversation instead this
was treated as a conspiracy theory and i
think we see
within this instance the dangerous power
of these uh
big tech and of their ability to shut
down conversations
that ought to be happening and also i
think unfortunately
a media that was so biased against the
former president
that they dismissed everything that he
was putting out though that anybody
around him was putting out there
as being conspiratorial that john
heilman quote seems ridiculous in
retrospect
this is absolutely something that we
ought to be talking about because we
want to prevent
these kinds of things from ever
happening again in the future
whatever it takes to achieve that
including any kind of sanctions
any kind of crackdown on the chinese
communist party i think it ought to be
on the table under consideration
and we need to be honest about the way
these things happen as opposed to
shoving things under the rug that may be
politically inconvenient
for our media and for the democratic
party last thing quickly morgan
you know we're talking about
investigations should republicans
say you know what let's do an
investigation of january 6th
uh oh sorry he's switching topics yeah
related to january 6 i mean i think
that's an incredibly
um difficult one for a lot of republican
voters because
the question will be should is this
going to be looked at
in a manner that it that is fair that
looks at all of the events that happened
last year i think that republicans are
going to have a very tough time
if they vote against it explaining why
uh clearly from the pr perspective
many in the democratic party uh have
been able to make that
case to the american people that there
should be an investigation those of us
in washington knows that these are often
political
so if it's fair if it's like the 911
commission if it's bipartisan
which it hasn't shown to be yet then i
think more republicans will consider it
all right panel stand by hey sean
hannity here hey click here to subscribe
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