Conservative firebrand Mark Levin chided Democrats for starting another investigative effort scrutinizing the Trump administration during the coronavirus outbreak.
Most of the Fox News host and conservative radio pundit’s ire was directed at California Rep. Adam Schiff, arguing it was the House Intelligence Committee chairman who was ill-prepared for the pandemic as Democrats blame the president for not acting swiftly enough.
“With respect to the Democrats investigating the coronavirus, that would be like Jack the Ripper investigating the failures of the London police force,” Levin told Fox News host Sean Hannity on Thursday.
“The fact is that Adam Schiff, who is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, was running an impeachment coup for months. He should have been on top of the China matter. He should have been on top of the virus matter, and so I want to know what Adam Schiff knew and when he knew it and when he started to hold hearings,” Levin added. “This guy is a disgrace, he is a reprobate, and he should stop giving aid and comfort to the enemy. First, it was Russia, now it’s China.”
Levin, who is a vocal defender of the president, also warned about the consequences of some of the emergency action the government has taken to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, including the passage of a historic $2.2 trillion economic relief bill, saying “massive inflation” akin to what is seen in Venezuela could happen.
Earlier this week, Schiff called for the creation of a commission to examine the federal government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic that has sickened thousands of U.S. citizens, telling of the need for lawmakers to “identify where we got it wrong and how we can be prepared for the next pandemic.”
Critics say Trump downplayed the coronavirus threat for weeks, contributing to a more extensive outbreak in the United States and a lack of preparedness. This was compounded by reports that the U.S. intelligence community warned Trump in early 2020 that China’s leadership was downplaying the real threat posed by the novel coronavirus outbreak.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced on Thursday a plan to create a special oversight panel to oversee the distribution of billions of federal dollars dedicated to the response to the COVID-19 outbreak, which originated in China.
Schiff also seized on a comment Trump made this week during a coronavirus briefing at the White House, suggesting he was distracted by impeachment earlier this year when the coronavirus outbreak was beginning to spread. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, too, said the impeachment trial, which ended in acquittal in February, “diverted” attention away from the coronavirus crisis in China.
“The facts are quite clear that the president’s weekslong, maybe monthslong, delay in taking this seriously has had catastrophic consequences that we’re only now beginning to see the scope of,” Schiff told MSNBC.
Trump warned against “partisan investigations” of his administration as it works to stem the spread of the coronavirus and alluded to the possibility of another “witch hunt” on the horizon.
“I want to remind everyone here in our nation’s capital, especially in Congress, that this is not the time for politics, endless, partisan investigations (here we go again) have already done extraordinary damage to our country in recent years,” Trump said on Thursday. “You see what happens. It’s witch hunt after witch hunt after witch hunt, and, in the end, the people doing the witch hunt have been losing, and they’ve been losing by a lot, and it’s not any time for witch hunts.”
Trump has used the “witch hunt” label to criticize the Russia investigation and the Ukraine impeachment effort, which ended in Senate acquittal earlier this year.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy called the plan for a new committee “really redundant.”
