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Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told “Hannity” Thursday that he knows many Americans are angry at China over the Beijing government’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan and disclosed “I know that the president feels the same way.”
“China caused an enormous amount of pain, loss of life and now a huge challenge for the global economy and the American economy as well by not sharing the information they had,” Pompeo said.
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“Sean, you should know we still don’t have full transparency from the Chinese Communist Party,” the former GOP congressman from Kansas added.
“I’m still concerned there are things we don’t know. We don’t know the history, and we haven’t been able to get our team on the ground to do the work it needs to do,” the secretary said. “This is an ongoing challenge in that the Chinese Communist Party and the World Health Organization have failed to do the things they have the responsibility to do when they have a pandemic inside of their country.”
Host Sean Hannity suggested that the U.S. could punish China by not honoring its debt to Beijing, though he added that “maybe that’s impossible.”
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Pompeo did not directly address the idea, but promised that the Chinese government will “pay a price for what they did” — adding that the administration’s goal right now is to control the virus, revive the economy and get the facts that are missing.
“[Americans] know this is a result of the virus that originated in Wuhan, China, and they know the Chinese government didn’t do the things it needed to do,” he said. “There will be a cost associated with that, we need to focus on here and now and there will be a time to make sure that we get this right, to make sure we are not dependent on China for our pharmaceutical goods and all the things we have seen that we just didn’t have right and that President Trump identified early on as things we needed to fix in the relationship between the United States and China.
When asked to comment on Trump’s tweet that said he had authorized the U.S. Navy to “shoot down and destroy” any Iranian gunships that harass U.S. vessels, Pompeo remarked that the current White House “behaves totally different from the previous one.”
“This president has taken a completely different approach, he’s told the Iranian regime ‘Enough, we aren’t going to permit this, we are going to defend our soldiers, our sailors and our airmen and Marines,” he said. “I think the Iranians understand that as well.”
