Washington D.C. – Congressman Michael McCaul (R-TX), Republican Leader of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, joined Fox News’ “America’s Newsroom” with Trace Gallagher to discuss the Russia bounty intelligence as well as his recently released report on the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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On the reported Russia bounty intel: “What you had – you had threads of intelligence coming in that the Russians were putting bounties on, working with the Taliban, which would be a divergence from where they had been before. This intelligence came out but another intelligence agency had a very strong dissenting view about the credibility of the intelligence itself. So when you have sort of a diversion or a different point of view within the IC itself, the briefer really has the discretion, in this case a career intelligence officer had the discretion whether to rise this to the level of the President or not. If it’s not – it has a low degree of confidence then at that point, it may not be actionable intelligence and therefore I can see why they would choose not to brief the President. As I examine this whole thing though, I think the President did deserve probably to know that this was out there. Only because of the timing of the peace deal with the Taliban itself that was going on literally two days after this presidential daily briefing came in.”  

On his report on the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic: “Our report reads almost like an indictment, it’s very factual. You know they detained all these doctors in the beginning trying to tell the truth that there’s a new SARS-like virus which required, you know, 24-hour reporting but instead the Chinese Communist Party detains them, gets retractions. They go into laboratories, destroy lab samples. And then when it comes to the human-to-human transmission, the World Health Organization gets completely duped by President Xi and the Communist Party, I think in large part because Tedros is their candidate to head up the WHO. So he parrots the lie that it’s not human-to-human, even though his own WHO expert is telling him it’s human-to-human in – on January the 14th. Then they have this big Spring Festival, 5 million people travel out of Wuhan throughout China, internationally. At this point in time it could’ve been contained but instead it went from an epidemic to a global pandemic. I think China is responsible, the Communist Party is responsible. They need to be held accountable.”

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