Pompeo and Intelligence Community Escalate for War against China

April 16, 2020 (EIRNS)—Fox News yesterday published, complete with bells and whistles, the story that “multiple sources” in the U.S. believe with “increasing confidence” that today’s coronavirus pandemic “likely” originated in the Wuhan Virology Laboratory in China. Fox’s sources say—so far—that it was not developed “as a bioweapon but as part of China’s attempt to demonstrate that its efforts to identify and combat viruses are equal to or greater than the capabilities of the United States.” They also emphasize that “it’s not definitive,” and others in the Trump Administration are skeptical of the whole charge.

Fox’s story reads like the British “Russians Poisoned Skripal” charges from March 2018: all innuendo, no proof. There is no coincidence; a story planted in the U.K. Daily Mail on April 5 kicked off this “Wuhan lab” campaign, reporting that “senior sources in the British government say that while ‘the balance of scientific advice’ is still that the deadly virus was first transmitted to humans from a live animal market in Wuhan, a leak from a laboratory in the Chinese city is ‘no longer being discounted.’ ”

Fox ran with the story, in clear coordination with Mike Pompeo’s State Department. As Fox reported, the Washington Post had published the day before diplomatic cables from January 2018 which had been leaked by the State Department and claimed there was lax security at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Fox reporter John Roberts, joined by other reporters at the daily White House Task Force briefing yesterday, tried to use the story to get President Donald Trump to break with President Xi Jinping. Roberts asked him about Fox’s story. Trump replied: “More and more, we’re hearing the story ... but we are doing a very thorough examination of this horrible situation that happened.”

Next question: Have you raised State Department concerns about lax security “in your many conversations with President Xi, Mr. President?” Trump replied: “I don’t want to discuss what I talked to him about the laboratory. I just don’t want to discuss it. It’s inappropriate right now.”

Pompeo then told Fox News’ Martha MacCallum that night, that

“what we do know is we know that this virus originated in Wuhan, China. We know that there is the Wuhan Institute of Virology just a handful of miles away from where the wet market was.... You should know that the United States government is working diligently to figure this out.”

MacCallum: “So how does this not have a very negative, heavyweight impact on our relationship with China going forward?”

Pompeo sidestepped the question, answering that he has been talking to “my counterparts all across the world over the past handful of days” about how China “needs to be accountable” for not sharing information in a timely fashion, which “put people all across the world at risk.”