Jamie Raskin nails GOP at Covid hearing: Lab leak 'would only deepen Trump's culpability'
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) warned Republicans that former President Donald Trump's culpability for Covid-19 deaths "would only deepen" if their theory about a lab leak in China was true.
Raskin made the remarks during a Tuesday House Oversight hearing into the origins of Covid-19.
"We are all interested in finding out the origins of the Covid-19 epidemic to make sure that such a nightmare never happens again to us," Raskin began. "Some people think that the finding that it all started with a lab leak would somehow absolve Donald Trump of his lethally reckless response to the pandemic. Of course, his response was dangerously dysfunctional regardless of how it got started."
The Maryland Democrat pointed out that Trump's former adviser, Dr. Deborah Birx, "said that we lost hundreds of thousands of American lives because of the flaws in the response."
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"But even if the virus came from a lab, as indeed it could have, we don't know that yet, that would only deepen Donald Trump's culpability because he was the one who repeatedly and enthusiastically praised China's early handling of the pandemic and assured us that he was working closely with President Xi on the response to it," Raskin added. "So let's just get the facts straight and leave all the political myth-making aside."