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House GOP Forms Task Force to Probe China’s Role in Pandemic

House GOP Forms Task Force to Probe China’s Role in Pandemic

(Bloomberg) -- House Republicans are forming a task force to investigate China’s role in the spread of the coronavirus as GOP lawmakers broaden their attempt to put a focus on the actions of the government in Beijing.

“China’s coverup directly led to this crisis,” House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy said Thursday. “It follows the same threatening pattern of behavior we have seen from the Chinese Communist Party for years, something that has long been a bipartisan consensus in Washington.”

Separately, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said on the Senate floor that as the virus spread, China’s Communist Party sought to “cover it up” and is turning on Chinese lawyers, activists and others trying to get at the truth.

He also said the Senate soon will take up legislation aimed at punishing China for its treatment of its Uighur Muslim minority while urging President Donald Trump to sanction “those responsible” for the repression.

Republicans have focused in recent weeks on blaming China for the coronavirus pandemic in the wake of lower approval ratings for Trump’s handling of the outbreak. The House GOP task force was given an October deadline to issue its report, just before the presidential election in which the virus response likely will be a central issue.

Trump has doubled down on claims that the coronavirus likely escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a laboratory that studies some of the world’s most dangerous pathogens. Trump and Secretary of State Michael Pompeo have said there is reason to believe the virus originated there though intelligence reports are less conclusive. The Director of National Intelligence issued a statement in April that the intelligence community “concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the Covid-19 virus was not man made or genetically modified.”

House Democrats have established a panel to oversee spending of coronavirus relief funds that McCarthy and other Republicans have said is designed to damage the Trump administration. McCarthy on Wednesday named five GOP lawmakers to the panel, which has seven Democratic members. House minority whip Steve Scalise will lead the Republican contingent.

Ohio Representative Jim Jordan, who also was selected by McCarthy for the oversight panel, called the committee a “blatant attempt to use the coronavirus pandemic for partisan ends.”

The separate GOP task force will be led by Representative Michael McCaul, the ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. McCarthy said the committee was originally supposed to be bipartisan, with an equal number of Republicans and Democrats participating, before talks between the parties ended.

McCarthy says the panel will look at whether the virus leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan China and that “so much of the intelligence” leads to the lab. He said an investigation also is needed into China’s decision to permit international flights out of Wuhan and for suppressing early reporting on the disease.

“There are real concerns and we want to get to the bottom of it,” he said.

©2020 Bloomberg L.P.