Capitol Police officers protecting members of Congress from attackers on Jan. 6 did an "exceptional job doing their duty keeping Congress safe, but congressional leaders under House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and their own leadership failed them," Sen. Ron Johnson said in a Newsmax interview Tuesday.
"I have condemned the violence," the Wisconsin Republican said on Newsmax's "John Bachman Now." "I've condemned the breach, but there's no doubt about the fact that Nancy Pelosi's committee is not going to ask the questions that really need to be answered. For example, what did she know? And when did she know it?"
Johnson also discussed the White House's COVID-19 response, including how it relates to China, and Rep. Michael McCaul's extensive report calling for an investigation to gain of function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
He told Bachman that he believes government health agencies are covering up for Dr. Anthony Fauci and that the "evidence has been hiding in plain sight" through redacted emails that are "pretty revealing."
Johnson called for unredacted copies of the messages to be released to the Senate Government Affairs Committee, on which he serves, pointing out that according to a federal law passed over 100 years ago, information from a government agency must be submitted if five committee members request it.
"All the NIH (National Institutes of Health) has to do is turn over those same approximately 4,000 pages of emails, unredacted," said Johnson. "These redactions are not valid and they certainly (are) not valid from standpoint of the production to legitimate congressional oversight requests, and so we're going to be pressing hard on this."
He also agreed that the matter won't get the scrutiny it deserves as long as Democrats control Congress and President Joe Biden remains in the White House and said he wants former President Donald Trump to be reelected "so we can finally start prying open the secrets inside these agencies that really do represent a deep state."
He also accused the Biden administration of having not been transparent on vaccine hesitancy, claiming that people are "being coerced into participating in the largest drug trial in history" with COVID vaccines.
"The CDC, the NIH, the FDA have not been transparent," he said. "There's plenty of information coming in from the U.K., from Israel. I think they actually do a better job of collecting the information there. They were a little bit ahead of us on the Delta variant."
But Biden and the Democrats "wanted to create this state of fear," Johnson said. "They want that state of fear to continue so they can maintain their control over our lives ... it's time for Americans to rise up and reclaim their lost freedom."
In other matters, Johnson spoke out about the ongoing immigration crisis, and said the administration is in a "complete sense of denial."
"We're having weeks where we're surging (with) 7,000 people per day being apprehended" by the Border Patrol, said Johnson. "This is completely overwhelming the system. There are 757 to 1000 known 'gotaways' a day."