Pompeo: Fauci Has Major Questions to Answer Over Emails

Dr. Anthony Fauci has a lot of questions to answer after a trove of emails points to further evidence that the coronavirus pandemic was the result of a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Thursday. 

"We knew that the evidence was accumulating, was piling up that the wet market [theory] didn’t hold water and that the much more likely scenario was that this had come from the virology lab in Wuhan," Pompeo, now a Fox News contributor, said on "Fox and Friends." 

And now, President Joe Biden must demand that answers come about the Wuhan laboratory, which is still operating. 

There are also major questions about EcoHealth President Peter Daszak after his name popped up in one of Fauci's emails. 

Daszak, a British disease expert, and Fauci had exchanged messages, with Fauci thanking the zoologist for commending him for publicly dismissing the theory that the coronavirus had leaked from the Wuhan lab. 

EcoHealth was the company that had forwarded grant money it got from the National Institutes of Health to the Wuhan lab. 

Fauci called the controversy about his emails with Daszak "nonsense" and insisted he still believes the COVID-19 pandemic began with the virus transferring from an animal species to a human, but that he's got an "open mind" that a lab leak could be at fault. 

Daszak, the only American who was part of the World Health Organization's delegation that visited China to investigate the origins of the virus in January and February, said the U.S. should accept WHO's preliminary conclusion  that it was "highly unlikely the lab was involved."

Daszak, said Pompeo, has "dirty hands."

"He was involved in this laboratory," said Pompeo. "There was taxpayer money that was funneled all through an alliance that he was responsible for. He was one of the lead investigators that was sent in to look at this. There’s a lot of questions to be answered. I think Dr. Fauci has a lot of questions to answer."

Meanwhile, the Chinese Communist Party is refusing to say what it knows, said Pompeo. 

"We must know how the U.S. government, how Dr. Fauci, Daszak, all the folks that were underwriting this laboratory, what they knew, when they knew it because this will help us answer the important questions that will keep us all safe," he added. 

Meanwhile, Pompeo said that many of the emails, coming while the "Chinese were covering this up" in January 2020, were at a time when Fauci "certainly would have seen the same intelligence that I saw."

"We would certainly have known that the risk this came from the laboratory was real and the Chinese Communist Party didn't want any of us to know that," said Pompeo. "That raised red flags throughout the entire United States government for far too long."

And Fauci allowed the people in the Trump administration who were talking about the impending pandemic to "carry the mantel" when they "couldn't get science," complained Pompeo. 

"We got politics instead and that's what you saw on the left-wing media," he said. "Politics was trumping science and that delayed our capacity to respond to what the Chinese Communist Party put upon the world."

• Guy Reschenthaler to Newsmax: Don't Give Fauci 'the Benefit of the Doubt'
• Early 2020 Emails Show Fauci Knew Coronavirus Was Potentially 'Engineered'