Rand Paul Grills Blinken On Stonewalling Of COVID Origin Investigation
(Steve Watson) Senator Rand Paul grilled Secretary of State Antony Blinken Wednesday, accusing the State Department of engaging in a lack of transparency when it comes to providing documents related to the ongoing probe of the origins of COVID.
Paul asked Blinken why documents related to funding of coronavirus research have not been provided to him despite repeated requests.
The Senator told Blinken that he had requested the material “on September 12th and November 7th of last year.”
“My question is, what’s the State Department hiding?” Paul asked, adding “Why won’t you give these records to the American people?”
“There’s a difference between can and may,” Paul continued, adding “You won’t do it, but you can do it.”
Blinken responded “My understanding is that our teams have been working to find an accommodation,” adding he hopes to “find a way forward that answers your concerns so that you get the information that you’re looking for.”
“We’re talking about unclassified material,” Paul shot back, adding “most of this is unclassified. And so we just had a unanimous vote in the Senate and in the House and President Biden just signed a bill saying he’s going to declassify stuff. But if you declassify it and you still hide it from the American people, that’s a problem.”
The Senator continued, “We spend all of this time lambasting authoritarians for lack of transparency, we have these silly networks on TV that are aligned with the Democrat Party saying democracy is under attack. Well, do you think transparency has something to do with democracy? You’re refusing to give records on research, money that went for research.”
“We want to read the research grant proposals. We want to read what the people in Wuhan sent back to the State Department saying they did. Which viruses did they create?” Paul further urged.
“And yet you won’t help us investigate this. You refuse and it makes — it is reminiscent of the countries we criticize for lack of transparency. And yet you sit there and say you’re still going to continue to refuse,” Paul asserted.
Blinken tried to squirm out of the grilling by saying he doesn’t have the expertise to comment, prompting Paul to respond “We don’t want to hear your spin.”
“We can’t just accept your spin on it because people — there may be self-interested the people who funded the program. We’re just asking to look at the data. But so far it has been no. We’ve had a few phone calls, but we don’t want your spin on it. We want to look at the documents ourselves,” Paul emphasised.
