Political battle continues in Washington as governors look to reopen while Cuomo says ‘overall direction is good’ in New York
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More on China and North Korea from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who has been speaking to ABC.
“I can tell you that there is a significant amount of evidence that this came from that laboratory in Wuhan,” Pompeo said, when asked about Trump’s
claim this week to have seen intelligenceconfirming the theory that Covid-19 was man-made and did not originate in bats and find its way to humans via a “wet market”, as is generally accepted. He did not, of course, say what the evidence was. Pompeo added: “
The best experts so far seem to think it was man-made. I have no reason to disbelieve that at this point.”
Then the exchange with This Week host Martha Raddatz got confusing, as to what Pompeo does or does not think. This is from ABC’s transcript:
RADDATZ: Your Office of the [Director of National Intelligence] says the consensus, the scientific consensus [is that the virus]
was not man-made or genetically modified.
POMPEO:
That’s right. I agree with that. Yeah. I’ve seen their analysis. I’ve seen the summary that you saw that was released publicly. I have no reason to doubt that that is accurate...
(CROSSTALK)
RADDATZ: OK, so just to be clear,
you do not think it was man-made or genetically modified?
POMPEO: I’ve seen what the intelligence community has said.
I have no reason to believe that they’ve got it wrong.
Um…
Pompeo continued to attack China for its handling of the outbreak and what he said was a delay in transmitting information to the rest of the world. So far, so in line with White House attempts to blame China and thereby shift attention or blame from its own stumbling response as the US situation worsened throughout February and March.
