“The presence of two different virology labs in Wuhan forces any reasonable and responsible leader to at least ask the question if the virus could have emerged in those labs,” Cotton said in the interview. “It’s not conclusive and it rarely is in the world of intelligence, but all of the evidence we have at this point points to those labs.”
Cotton spoke to Trump in January and lobbied him to ban flights to China. Now Trump cites the travel ban multiple times a day when defending his national leadership. Cotton also urged Americans to leave China and in early February warned coronavirus would likely become a pandemic, more than a month before the World Health Organization made it official.
Some critics say he could have done more.
“If you were so clever and saw that China was lying, then why did the president believe them?” said former Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.), who served with Cotton for four years.
“You can’t have it both ways. You can’t say ‘I saw it coming.’ If you saw it coming, what did you do to stop it?” she said. “It just drives me frickin’ crazy. What I’m saying is, did you write a note to yourself in your basement? Who cares if you were right. What did you do about it?”
Cotton is one of the sharpest-edged combatants in the Capitol. He led a successful effort to tank an immigration compromise Heitkamp crafted in 2018 and organized a Republican letter to Iran undermining President Barack Obama’s nuclear agreement. He helped sink then-Speaker Paul Ryan’s “border adjustment tax” idea and nearly stopped a popular criminal justice reform bill from becoming law.
Yet on China issues, he’s been relatively bipartisan — working closely with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) on curbing Chinese influence abroad. Schumer sometimes refers to him as “Mr. ZTE,” a reference to Cotton’s efforts to bar the Chinese telecom company from the United States.
The Chinese Embassy did not respond to a request for comment, but it’s clear the Chinese government is keenly observing the flurry of GOP rhetoric targeting its role in the spread of the disease.
“It’s just all too obvious why some political forces in the U.S. have been obsessively attacking China using the pandemic as a weapon,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang on Monday. “We firmly oppose the attempts of some people in the U.S. to grab more votes and undermine China’s interests by smearing China.”
But even Republicans with wildly different dispositions than Cotton praise his early warnings on China.
“Sen. Cotton is absolutely right to point the finger at China and to make sure the world knows from where this virus came and why we collectively had a delayed response to it,” said Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), the party’s 2012 nominee. “You have to tip your cap to Sen. Cotton.”
Marianne LeVine contributed to this report.
Source: politico.com
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