The White House ordered spy agencies to dig through their intelligence collections to determine whether China or the World Health Organization hid the extent of the coronavirus early on in the outbreak.
The White House sent a “tasking” last week to the CIA, the National Security Agency, and the Defense Intelligence Agency asking for information on the early days of the pandemic, according to NBC News.
President Trump referenced an investigation during his news conference Monday.
“We’re doing very serious investigations,” Trump said. “We are not happy with that whole situation because we believe it could have been stopped at the source. It could have been stopped quickly, and it wouldn’t have spread all over the world.”
The agencies were asked to look into what the WHO knew about two research labs in Wuhan. Fox News reported earlier this month that the U.S. intelligence community is carrying out a full-scale investigation into the theory that the novel coronavirus, which was first detected in China in late 2019, may have originated in a government lab in Wuhan, the result of an accidental escape or inadvertent infection.
The Trump administration has sought to blame the Chinese government for its slow response to the crisis, accusing Beijing of hiding the extent of the outbreak.
Trump also said he was suspending U.S. funding for the WHO, claiming that the organization hid evidence of human-to-human transmission.
According to the Washington Post, Trump was repeatedly warned about the threat in his daily intelligence briefing books in January and February. The intelligence provided to Trump tracked the virus’s spread around the world, asserted that China was covering up the disease’s transmissibility and death toll, and warned of political and economic consequences. The report said the warnings came as Trump downplayed the virus and his administration failed to plan for the scale of the threat.
White House spokesman Hogan Gidley denied that Trump was slow to respond to the virus.
“President Trump rose to fight this crisis head-on by taking early, aggressive, historic action to protect the health, wealth, and well-being of the American people,” Gidley said.
