The Biden administration is required by law to declassify all federal information on the suspected lab leak of COVID-19 by this weekend.
Missouri Senator Josh Hawley is waiting with bated breath – but likely isn’t holding it.
“The deadline is this weekend,” he told The Heartlander Thursday. “So, I’m looking forward to it. And believe you me, if they don’t do it, or if they only give us a couple of lines and they redact everything else, we’re going to have a big fight about it, and we will go back and continue to work and work and work until we get the truth to the American people.”
Under the COVID Origins Act filed by Hawley, passed unanimously by Congress and signed by this president in March, the Biden administration has until June 18 to declassify all federal information on the possible leak of COVID-19 from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.
So far there has been no sign the administration is going to comply. Will there be consequences if it doesn’t?
“Oh yeah, there will be consequences,” Hawley says. “I mean, there’ll be consequences in terms of what they’re able to do, their funding. So, (non-compliance) is not an option. They are ordered to, they are required to, it’s mandated. It’s not a ‘please.’ It is the law. The law requires them to declassify what the federal government knows about COVID origins.”
Could the administration give the appearance of going along with the law, then actually not do it?
“Well, we’ll see. I mean, we’ll see,” Hawley says warily. “I hope not. I hope it’s full compliance. I mean, Joe Biden signed it because he didn’t really have a choice. How do you explain to the American people that you don’t want them to know about the origins of COVID? Especially after you’ve lied to them, as his administration has, and as (Dr. Anthony) Fauci did for years.
“You know, Fauci said, ‘Oh, it didn’t come from a lab; nobody believes that; that’s a conspiracy theory.’ Oh, really? Now we know that most of our intelligence agencies, or at least many of them, think that it did come from a lab.”
In addition, a new report alleges the first to contract COVID-19 were Wuhan lab scientists. The Heartlander asked Hawley why, in the face of that reporting, our own government isn’t opening up about the origins of COVID.
“Yeah, exactly. Well, that’s why we had to pass my bill to force them to open up about it. So, let’s see. Again, they’re required to do it. The deadline is coming right up. Let’s see what they give us.”
Hawley has needed to be careful not to disclose inside information on the origins of COVID he and other members of Congress have already been privy to – but he says most of it has now been reported in the media anyway.
“My view is that this was a lab leak,” he says. “This was China doing research, gain-of-function research, on coronaviruses. And they had a leak and it infected a researcher, or a number of researchers, and then it spread from there. So, this was their lab doing this.
“Now, why were they doing it? That’s a whole other question. Was this for weapons development? We don’t know. We should find that out. But at the very least, I think the American people deserve to know the link to a lab here … the fact that it was a lab leak, it wasn’t just all natural.
“That is a very different story than we were told for years. And the American people deserve to know it.”
