Pompeo Rips Fauci Over ‘Crazy’ China Remarks: ‘Naïve Beyond All Possible Imagination,’ Spouts CCP Propaganda

LAURA INGRAHAM, FOX NEWS HOST: Joining me now is Mike Pompeo, former secretary of state and distinguished fellow at the Hudson Institute. Secretary Pompeo, thank you for joining us. What we’ve learned over the past few days about Fauci and the NIH, and the State Department is truly disturbing. Your reaction.

MIKE POMPEO, FORMER SECRETARY OF STATE: Laura it should come as no surprise to anyone that there are folks at State Department that didn’t like President Trump, didn’t like me, didn’t like what we were doing and were going to work to thwart our efforts. So it’s no great surprise to hear Fauci this morning talk about how the Chinese have an interest in us discovering what happened. It’s just crazy talk. The Chinese have a deep interest in covering it up and they’ve done so pretty darn effectively. In fact, it was the State Department that ultimately, we had we had big fights inside the organization, but it was us ultimately, who put out documents in January 15 that demonstrated some of the central facts we now know that lead to the overwhelming amount of evidence that demonstrates that this probably did come from this virology lab. It was good work by the State Department team. We overcame lots of internal bureaucracy to get there. And lots of internal debate from NIH folks who were trying to suppress what we’re doing the State Department as well.

INGRAHAM: The Vanity Fair piece, secretary describes how a guy named Miles Yu, the State Department’s principal China strategist, began mirroring the Wuhan Institute’s website and compiling a dossier of questions about its research. The article then claims that in April, he gave this dossier to you and then you demanded access to the labs there. But then the Office of the Director of Intel later that month, released this statement, saying the intel community also concurs with the wide scientific consensus that COVID-19 was not manmade or genetically modified. Mr. Secretary, why was the DNI downplaying what you are trying to uncover at the time?

POMPEO: Well the Vanity Fair piece is right, I was handed an extensive piece of work that a fello named Miles Yu did. He’s a professor at the Naval Academy that was working for me at the State Department. He speaks Mandarin, he was able to read lots of things others couldn’t get their hands on. And it was pretty clear. It was April when I received that if I remember, right, it was in early May, just a few days after that I was on TV talking about what I could get declassified at that point. We worked diligently to get the Intelligence Community to declassify more. Director Ratcliffe was a great partner and trying to do that, but there were folks all over the community who just didn’t want to talk about this, who wanted to stay focused on other things. They didn’t want the world to know that the Chinese Communist Party was in the process of covering up–

INGRAHAM: Why? Why?

POMPEO: –what turns out might have been several million losses of life. You know, I’ll leave that to others to speculate. But when you heard Dr. Fauci this morning, Laura, those are the exact same words, the exact same excuses, the exact same theories that the Chinese Communist Party has presenting for over a year now, we can all draw our own conclusions. I know this. We had a group inside the State Department, Miles Yu, a handful of others working diligently to get this information out to the American people so the world could see what the Chinese Communist Party had done to all of us.

INGRAHAM: But Dr. Fauci is essentially saying, what the CCP is saying about China, that it’s highly unlikely possible that things happen in a lab, but you really can’t tell one from the other when the way they discuss the situation at the start of this pandemic.

POMPEO: He implies good faith for the Chinese Communist Party, Laura. Here we are in the 32nd anniversary of Tiananmen Square, where we saw the brutality of this regime, a regime that doesn’t care about human life. For Dr. Fauci go and think for a moment that the Chinese Communist Party cared that there were people in Wuhan that were dying, whether it was Chinese people or Americans, whoever else might be there is just naïve beyond all possible imagination. The Chinese Communist Party doesn’t care for a moment, they have no desire for the world to know what happened. They could clear this all up in a minute if they wanted to. They’ve chosen not to, I think that’s another link in the chain that demonstrates that when we get to the end of this, we will have demonstrated that the Chinese knew what had happened, and their virology lab was at the center of it.

INGRAHAM: Now, one former NSC official Matt Pottinger, actually went on ‘Face the Nation’ back in February, to lay out the lab leak evidence, and you probably don’t remember it because it never aired. But here it is now.

[START VIDEO]

MATT POTTINGER, FORMER NSC OFFICIAL: The types of research that were underway both by the civilian staff of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and also, military researchers … were studies into exactly the kinds of viruses that you know, ones that are 96%, similar to the virus that’s now making us all sick. They were doing gain of function research using humanized mice.

[END VIDEO]

INGRAHAM: Mr. Secretary, could this information from Pottinger, who is a extremely smart individual, indicate that we can’t necessarily just rule out that this, you know, this just wasn’t some, you know, a lab leak or, you know, could be even a dual use situation.

POMPEO: Yeah, we don’t know. I saw the statements that Matt made. We knew the same thing inside the State Department, we’d seen the same data, you know that your viewers should know, people talk about this as if we don’t know very much. We actually know an awful lot about what was going on. We talk about getting to function research, the fact that this lab was level four and had security leaks before, that there were doctors who became ill and were hospitalized there in the fall of 2019. We have an awful lot of evidence pointing to what happened. What was the Chinese Communist Party’s intention? We know there was military activity taking place at this same laboratory, we don’t know exactly what they were doing. But we know this, we know that they don’t want you to know. And that suggests to me, we should give them no benefit of the doubt. And we should impose enormous costs on the Chinese Communist Party until they come clean about what happened inside their country.

INGRAHAM: Just a simple yes or no. Should any U.S. tax dollars be going to any group that is in partnership with the Wuhan Virology Institute, given what we know about China, their goals and their lack of transparency? Should any of this been happening?

POMPEO: Absolutely not. It’s reckless.