Republicans on the House Oversight Committee, while planning to grill Dr. Anthony Fauci extensively on matters surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, will start first with "every government official from the bottom up" to determine what happened, especially in connection with the National Institution of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and its grant to the EcoHealth Alliance, Rep. James Comer said on Newsmax on Thursday.
"We're going to hear from everyone in the government that had anything to do with approving tax dollars to go to EcoHealth Alliance, which we know now went to the Wuhan lab to fund gain-of-function research," the Kentucky Republican commented on Newsmax's "National Report." "We also want to hear from any government employee that had anything to do with grant dollars going to the scientists who backed up all of Fauci's claims."
Comer said lawmakers have learned from their research that tax dollars went through the NIH to "these scientists that were always getting Dr. Fauci's back and giving him a green light to say or do whatever he wanted."
However, Fauci's testimony will come later, even though many were expecting the committee to bring him in on day one, said Comer.
"We want to talk to every government employee from the very bottom all the way to the top, and we're starting at the bottom to know the thought process, to explain to us what you were thinking," Comer said.
"When you look at the EcoHealth grant, not only they should have never gotten a grant to do anything like gain-of-function research, they were out of compliance. When the government awards money in the form of grants to these universities and to these companies that are doing research, they're supposed to constantly update the government on the progress of their grant. But the government let them get away with everything."
Congress, meanwhile, has "no idea" where all the tax dollars are going after over a decade of not debating spending bills. Republicans are trying to change that, said Comer.
"We're putting a case together to where we have substantial evidence on what we think are many areas of wrongdoing at the hands of Dr. Fauci and Dr. [Francis] Collins, but that starts at the very bottom and it's going to take time," said Comer. "We're going to interview all these employees. You're talking about hundreds of hours of testimony from employees just to understand the full picture of what happened, every decision that was made, and why it was made."
Meanwhile, Republicans on the House Permanent Select Committee released a report Wednesday that conflicts with last year's findings by the intelligence community that the virus may have been part of a Chinese biological weapons research program, reports The New York Post, and Comer said that "confirms our worst fears."
"To think that American tax dollars were playing a role in that is the ultimate slap in the face of the American taxpayers and a slap in the face to everyone who lost a loved one," he said.
"We need to know exactly what was going on in the lab. Another thing that report points out is this is another failure of our intelligence community because the intelligence community either didn't know what was going on, and they should have, or they covered it up."
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