Jamie Raskin Blasts Trump, Xi Relationship Amid Covid Committee Meeting

• The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic held a hearing on Wednesday to look into the origins of the pandemic.
• During the hearing, Representative Jamie Raskin blasted former President Donald Trump for his meetings with Chinese President Xi Jinping in the early months of the pandemic.
• Raskin pointed to multiple occasions where Trump boasted about his close working relationship with Xi and said Trump's fawning embrace of the Chinese Communist Party could be to blame should it be revealed that COVID was a product of a lab incident.

Maryland Representative Jamie Raskin blasted former President Donald Trump for his meetings with Chinese President Xi Jinping in the early months of the pandemic during a GOP-led House hearing this week.

Pointing to multiple occasions where Trump "boasted" about how closely he and Xi were working together on COVID and about Xi's alleged "openness and transparency" to him on the origins of the virus, Raskin said Trump's "fawning, starstruck, sycophantic embrace" of the Chinese Communist's Party is to blame should it later be revealed that COVID was a product of a lab incident.

The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic held a hearing on Wednesday to dig into the origins of the pandemic, with Republicans focusing on the lab leak theory that those like GOP Senator Rand Paul have promoted.

Paul gained national attention last year for sparring with Dr. Anthony Fauci, who was the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the time, and accusing the infectious disease expert of lying to the American public about the origins of the virus during a series of Senate hearings.

While the theory was long dismissed as a conspiracy, it has recently gained a boost as the most likely cause of the pandemic after new intelligence led federal agencies to draw similar conclusions.

On Wednesday, Raskin, a Democrat, aimed to flip the Republican talk point on its head, saying that if the theory is true, Trump's meeting with Xi in the early days of the pandemic would "only deepen [Trump's] culpability in the most profound way."

"Over the course of the crisis, beginning in January of 2020 and lasting through the spring, on more than 42 different occasions that we have identified so far, President Trump openly praised and defended the performance of Communist Party Secretary and Chinese President Xi in his handling of COIVD-19," Raskin said during the hearing.

As an example, Raskin pointed to several tweets written by Trump, including one from March 27, 2020, in which the former president claimed that China had "developed a strong understanding of the Virus" after a "very good conversation" with Xi.

"We are working closely together. Much respect!" the former president wrote of his Chinese counterpart.

Raskin said he would "happily" provide more evidence to his Republican colleagues "who think the hunt for the origins will somehow absolve the last administration."

Republicans have tried to use the lab leak theory to accuse federal officials, like Fauci, of hiding the possibility that COVID was the result of an accidental lab leak or even an intentional biochemical weapon of mass destruction.

Although the Energy Department and the FBI have stated that the theory is likely to be true, subcommittee Ranking Member Raul Ruiz has stated that the evidence "remains inconclusive" and that scientists and the U.S. intelligence community must continue to gather the facts in order to make a final determination about the origins of COVID.

On Wednesday, Raskin said that regardless of what the origins of the pandemic may really be, Trump was "the biggest apologist" for the CCP's COVID response.

"He could have taken the origins of the pandemic seriously and held the CCP accountable, he could have pushed back against the CCP for interfering with the [World Health Organization's] investigations into its origins and he could have asked our intelligence community to intervene," the congressman said. "He did none of those things."

Newsweek reached out to Trump for comment.