Tennessee’s Republican U.S. representatives urged House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to hold China accountable for causing the COVID-19 pandemic. The representatives signed onto the four-page letter last Friday, along with 202 other Republican representatives.
Two Republicans – Illinois Representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL-16) and Virginia Representative Morgan Griffith (R-VA-09) – didn’t sign onto the letter. The House Republican representatives that did sign onto the letter derided Pelosi for dismissing previous President Donald Trump’s speculation of China’s involvement in the COVID-19 outbreak last year. Sources say Pelosi hasn’t responded to the letter yet.
“There is mounting evidence the pandemic started in a Chinese lab, and the CCP [Chinese Community Party] covered it up. If that is the case, the CCP is responsible for the deaths of almost 600,000 Americans and millions more worldwide,” read the letter. “These questions about the CCP’s liability are not a diversion, as you falsely claimed. To the contrary, every American family that lost someone deserves answers about the origin of this terrible virus, and House Democrats’ ongoing refusal to allocate investigative resources to get those answers is an affront to them.”
The letter cited information from U.S. intelligence sources regarding three November 2019 COVID-19 cases among China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) researchers. It also noted, at length, the CCP’s unwillingness to cooperate with investigations and withholding crucial information about the early cases of COVID-19.
Additionally, the letter outlined several distinct patterns by the CCP to conceal the truth about COVID-19 through media deception, conspiracies with officials, propaganda, censorship, threats, and expulsion of U.S. journalists.
These claims in the letter carry more weight following the bulk release of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s emails on Wednesday.
The email release comes over a year after The Daily Caller News Foundation (DCNF) initially filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit last May against the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) for Fauci’s communications. Last September, a federal judge ordered the government to release the communications beginning October 21, which numbered around 4,200 records in total. DCNF estimated that the release wouldn’t be completed until 2022.
In March, The Daily Caller published a story about one of Fauci’s emails obtained through their FOIA lawsuit, which detailed how his deputy was required to sign a confidentiality agreement before joining a WHO team in China to investigate COVID-19 early last year, before the national emergency was declared.
This week, Buzzfeed News and The Washington Post received a combined total of over 4,000 pages of emails following FOIA requests.
On Friday, Kentucky Representative Andy Barr (R-KY-06) introduced a resolution to investigate China’s role in the COVID-19 outbreak. Representative Diana Harshbarger (R-TN-01) has signed on to support the legislation.
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Corinne Murdock is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and the Star News Network. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to [email protected].
Pelosi will never touch her cash cow.
Good luck with that, Pelosi along with half our congressional members and the Biden Crime Family have business ties with China, so I really don’t believe much will happen.
Roger – So true.