Former President Donald Trump planned to haul Anthony Fauci in front of a US presidential commission as part of a larger effort to hold China and its collaborators responsible for the pandemic, according to The Australian.
Trump’s team, spearheaded by adviser Peter Navarro, had gone so far as to draft an executive order and compile a reparations bill, however the advanced plans were scrapped at the last minute after Trump’s ever-helpful advisers (Larry Kudlow in particular) talked him out of it, according to an upcoming book on the origins of COVID-19, What Really Happened in Wuhan.
Mr Trump was “enthusiastic” about creating a presidential commission similar to those whichprobed the 9/11 terror attacks and the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
A White House executive order was drafted in August 2020 stating: “By the authority vested inme as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered as follows: The National Commission on the Origins and Costs of COVID-19 is hereby established.” –The Australian
The executive order was adviser Peter Navaro’s idea, and had the support of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Trump wanted Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) to head up the commission, according to the draft Executive Order, while Pompeo’s senior policy adviser Mary Kissell and China adviser Miles Yu were slated to act as co-chair and vice co-chair or executive director.
Sessions on geopolitics and a general from Fort Detrick – home to the US biological defense program in Maryland, would run the virology portion of the inquiry – during which Fauci would be brought in to explain why he funded risky coronavirus research in Wuhan. Peter Daszak, head of nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance (who received millions in funding from Fauci’s NIH) would be grilled on the missing WIV virus database, among other things.
Other revelations from the book include:
- President Biden scrapped a State Department effort by its Arms, Control, Verification and Compliance Unit to formally confront China in Geneva over its cover-up of the rapidly spreading virus, as well as alleged breaches of the biological weapons convention in the Wuhan lab.
- US officials suspected that China had developed a vaccine prior to the COVID-19 outbreak in a “sensitive but unclassified” internal report.
- US intelligence agencies sought advice from the highly-conflicted Daszak and Ralph Baric over whether the virus had a ‘natural origin’ or a laboratory origin. Daszak and Barick (of the University of North Carolina) both have long histories working with bat researchers at the Wuhan Institute of virology, and have insisted the virus could have only emerged via natural origin. As a result, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence published a statement saying it could not have been man-made.
According to the book, the executive order states that the commission would be tasked with investigating “the origins of the COVID-19pandemic; the economic, political social, human, and other costs of the pandemic borne by the United States; and whether the People’s Republic of China or the Chinese Communist Party have used the pandemic to advance their own economic, geopolitical, military, or territorial agendas,” and would tally a bill to send to Beijing “to recover any damages as well as all costs estimated.”
Pushback
Such a commission, determined to hold the Communist Party to account and ask it to pay reparations for the economic and human damage from the pandemic, would have been explosive, and significantly corrode already strained China-US relations. Mr Yu had an office setup in the White House to run the commission and Mr Navarro says, “We almost got to the finish line”.
But the presidential commission was killed off during a meeting in the Oval Office where Mr Trump’s economic advisers argued fiercely against it.
Other officials were concerned the commission would be seen as a political manoeuvre so close to the November election and be derided by the media.
One senior White House official said: “It was actually an excellent idea, just floated way too late.”
“It would’ve looked very political, and (we) had tried very, very hard to make the China issue nonpartisan.” -The Australian
“An inquiry like that is exactly the right thing but it was going to be almost impossible for President Trump to appoint a commission that was going to be viewed as bipartisan,” said one senior Trump official, adding “People were too crazed on the left. I don’t think the left would have participated in it.”
According to Navarro, killing the plan was a mistake. “They’re all China apologists,” he said, adding “(Director of the National Economic Council Larry) Kidlow is just stupid, Dumb. You can quote me on that.”
“That was the biggest heartbreak in my four years at the White House. I worked really hard to get that commission established.
“We had a presidential commission for Pearl Harbor, for the BP oil spill and for the Kennedy assassination. We need one into the origins of the coronavirus as well.”
Read the rest of the report here.
Via Zero Hedge
