The Energy Department reportedly concluded that COVID-19 most likely originated in a Chinese lab, vindicating claims from many Republicans. On "Fox & Friends" Tuesday, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., called out the Biden administration for "trying to excuse" China and blasted the mainstream media for calling him a conspiracy theorist when he mentioned the suspected lab leak in 2020.
TOM COTTON: From the very beginning, I believed this virus almost certainly came from a lab. I thought it was just a matter of common sense. You didn't need secret intelligence or classified information just to look at the facts. You had a food market that the Chinese communists were saying was the source of the virus and didn't even sell bats in an area where bats were not located. And then you had a laboratory where they were known to focus and work with bat-based coronaviruses that had a history, like many Chinese labs of safety incidents. Again, to me it was just a matter of common sense. But what did the liberal media and what did Joe Biden and other Democrats do? When you point these things out, they called you a racist or a xenophobe. They said you were spreading conspiracy theories and all the rest. And now, three years on, I think most Americans recognize that it almost certainly came from that laboratory, that the Chinese communists covered it up, and that you still have the liberal media and Democrats acting like lawyers for Chinese communists, trying to excuse them, trying to say, well, there's not much consensus, we [do] not know for sure, much like they did a couple of weeks ago when China sent a spy balloon to America.
And you had people in Joe Biden's administration saying, well, maybe it was just blown off course by strong winds. The kind of deliberate obfuscation and excuse-making for China that we saw three years ago about this lab incident and that we saw a couple of weeks ago about the balloon that flew over across America. It's dangerous for the American people because it encourages Chinese communists to think that America will not stand up to their provocations.
