House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff said Democrats are investigating whether President Trump ignored warnings from the intelligence community about the coronavirus pandemic.
Schiff, who oversaw the congressional investigation into Trump’s conduct toward Ukraine, which led to the president’s impeachment, said his committee is looking into what COVID-19 intelligence material reached the president and how the administration responded.
“When did the intelligence community first start reporting this? What were they telling us, frankly, about the danger of pandemics even before this one? What did they first observe going on in China? When did this first make its way into the president’s daily brief — or get briefed to Congress?” the California Democrat told Mother Jones in a recent interview.
“So much of the information was in the public realm. You had the Chinese reporting the virus. You had the WHO reporting the virus. You had the president’s own people publicly talking about the danger. And even well after the virus was established fact, and it was spreading, and it had come to the United States, you still had the president talking it down, like it was going to be no worse than a flu. And that he had the problem wholly contained, and it was under control,” he said.
Schiff has already proposed a bipartisan commission with subpoena power to investigate the government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. The commission would begin its investigation after the virus has subsided.
The U.S. intelligence community reportedly believes the Chinese government covered up the true scale of the outbreak inside its country, but when intelligence agencies started warning about the threat has been disputed. The Defense Department denied a report this week that said an “intelligence report” had warned about the coronavirus as far back as November.
