Republicans Demand Testimony of WHO Director, Chinese Ambassador

(Bloomberg) -- Republicans on a House coronavirus oversight subcommittee are demanding that the panel’s Democratic members pursue the testimony of World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and Chinese Ambassador to the U.S. Cui Tiankai.

Following the lead of President Donald Trump, Republicans in Congress are attempting to focus on the roles of China and the global health organization in the pandemic at the same time Democrats are criticizing the administration’s handling of the outbreak.

In a letter Tuesday to the panel’s chairman, Representative Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, the Republicans said the new subcommittee should investigate “China’s obfuscation of the origin of Covid-19” and “manipulation of the WHO to cover up the severity of the outbreak.”

The panel’s Republicans, led by the No. 2 House Republican Steve Scalise of Louisiana and Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, also are pushing to look into allegations the Chinese government is stealing American medical research and disrupting the medical supply chain.

Trump has been escalating his fight with China and the WHO. On Monday, he threatened to withdraw the U.S. from the Organization. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said Trump’s letter to the WHO was “full of insinuations” and aimed “to mislead the public and to achieve the purpose of stigmatizing China’s epidemic control efforts while shirking its own responsibility.”

Democrats have accused Trump and Republicans of using WHO and China to distract from the administration’s own response to global pandemic before the November election.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats, including Clyburn, the No. 3 House Democrat, have said the main purpose of the new select subcommittee is to keep watch over the distribution and use of coronavirus funding.

At a hearing last week Clyburn dismissed calls from Republicans to investigate China. “That is not in our portfolio,” he said.

But in their letter to Clyburn, Scalise and four GOP colleagues urged Democrats Democrats to “help us hold the Chinese government accountable for its cynical strategy to exploit a pandemic of its own making.”

The letter urges Clyburn to convene such hearings “in-person, in the Capitol, to convey the seriousness of our questions and to fulfill our constitutional obligation to conduct oversight in this extraordinary case.”

There was no immediate new response from Clyburn to the letter.

The House Republican demands came after Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Democrats led by ranking member Gary Peters of Michigan urged that panel’s GOP chairman in a letter to hold a hearing to examine the federal government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.

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