'Benghazi All Over Again': Fauci Braces For House GOP Investigations
Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
White House COVID-19 advisor Anthony Fauci said he expects to be investigated by Republicans if they take back control of the House during the 2022 midterm elections.
“It’s Benghazi hearings all over again,” Fauci told The Washington Post on Tuesday in reference to numerous GOP lawmakers saying they will look into alleged gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, located near where the first COVID-19 cases were officially reported in late 2019.
Fauci, an unelected federal official who has headed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) since 1984, claimed that potential hearings “will distract me from doing my job, the way it’s doing right now.” Should there be hearings and an investigation, Fauci asserted that “there will be nothing there.”
His reference to the Benghazi hearings was an apparent comparison to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who was the focal point of Republicans investigating the 2012 attacks on a consulate in Benghazi, Libya, that left several Americans dead.
Several prominent House Republicans have gone on the record to say that they will probe Fauci’s agency and its ties to research in Wuhan.
“And if you’re watching this, Dr. Fauci, look out because when the Americans give us control in the House of Representatives, God willing, we’re going to get some answers on behalf of the American people,” Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) told Fox News last week.
The Texas lawmaker’s comment came just a few days after Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), the ranking Republican member of the House Judiciary Committee, told Just The News that the GOP investigate the NIAID chief over how they responded to the COVID-19 pandemic. Whether or not tax dollars were used to fund research into “gain-of-function,” a controversial form of research, will be probed as well, Jordan said.
In October 2021, Fauci told ABC News that he stood by a previous assertion during a Senate hearing that neither NIAID nor the National Institutes of Health, which oversees NIAID, funded gain-of-function research in China.
“The framework under which we have guidance about the conduct of research that we fund, the funding at the Wuhan Institute was to be able to determine what is out there in the environment, in bat viruses in China,” Fauci commented. “And the research was very strictly under what we call a framework of oversight of the type of research. And under those conditions which we have explained very, very clearly, does not constitute research of gain of function of concern.”
Historically, the party of the president tends to lose seats in the House or Senate during the midterm elections. Public statements made by prominent democrats, including Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-N.Y.), who chairs the Democrats’ midterm election apparatus, appear to suggest that Democrats are trying to realign their messaging ahead of the November elections.
“The problem is not the voters. … The problem is us,” Maloney reportedly told fellow Democrats at a conference over the past weekend. “They think that we’re divisive and too focused on cultural issues. They think that we’re preachy. They think that we act like we know better than parents when it comes to their kids in schools,” he added.
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