Fox News Channel’s excellent White House correspondent Peter Doocy just confronted John Kirby, the White House coordinator for strategic communications at the National Security Council, on the origins of Covid and the Biden Adminstration’s response to it.
Specifically, Doocy asked whether President Biden intends to sign the “COVID-19 Origin Act of 2023” into law. If he did so, the bill would require the Director of National Intelligence to declassify all intelligence surrounding the origins of COVID-19. The Senate passed the legislation Thursday, and the bill currently awaits a House vote. Given that the GOP controls the House, it will almost certainly get through the House and thus Biden will determine whether it becomes law or not.
Asking Kirby about that, Doocy said “So, a bill requiring the DNI to declassify the COVID origins intel passed the Senate. If it passes the House too, would President Biden sign it?”
Responding, Kirby did the usual for the Biden Administration and tried dodging
“I won’t get ahead of the President’s decision-making, Peter. But, look, we — a couple of things to keep in mind. Right after taking office, the President declassified and had — and made public the DNI’s initial findings here about the source of COVID. So, he already very swiftly and unilaterally put information out there. That’s one.
“Two, the intelligence community continues to assess the origins of COVID. I know I’ve seen press reporting about some preliminary findings that — of a classified nature. But there’s still no consensus. And that’s why the President has directed the team to stay at that work because he wants to know. He wants to know as best we can know what the origins were so that we can work to better prevent a future pandemic.”
Doocy pressed, using FBI Director Christopher Wray’s words against the administration, asking “But we’ve got the FBI Director saying, “Most likely a potential lab incident” in Wuhan. If — if a foreign country came to the United States and killed 1.1 million Americans with guns, would the President just let that slide?”
Kirby then pushed back on Doocy suggesting that Biden was letting it all slide, saying:
Nobody is letting anything slide. That’s why the President wants the intelligence community to work so hard to — to get to — hopefully, to get some — to some answers that — that we can rely on.
Right now, there’s just no consensus. It’s hard to take a look at what the President has done here — in terms of declassifying and making public information already; in terms of the constant and consistent briefings to members of Congress in a classified and unclassified setting in just recent weeks on what the origins of COVID were; and on his tasking, again, to the intelligence community to keep at that work — and come away from that thinking that he’s not taking this seriously.
Watch their back and forth spat here:
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded Rumble video
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