Trump Accuses Fauci of Being ‘In the Pocket of China’

Former President Donald Trump said Monday that by his assessment, Dr. Anthony Fauci was in “the pocket of China.”

“I always got along with him great, but he was wrong on so many fronts,” Trump said in a morning interview with Fox Business Network’s Stuart Varney. “If you look at his emails, they’re really horrible. He was in the pocket, it would seem … of China, the way he pandered to them and the way he dealt with them.”

Fauci’s emails were released to the public last week through a Freedom of Information Act request by BuzzFeed and The Washington Post. The tranche of messages showed at least one of Fauci’s connections sharing a Mediaite story with him about Fox News’ Bret Baier claiming that sources were “increasingly confident” the Covid-19 outbreak began in the Wuhan Institute of Virology — which received funding for several years from the National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases headed by Fauci. They also showed Fauci sharing a 2015 study — in February 2020 — about “a SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses” with NIAID Deputy Director Hugh Auchincloss. The study was coauthored by a researcher at the lab, and Auchincloss indicated in his reply to Fauci that experiments for the paper were performed before a “pause” on gain of function research, in which scientists seek to enhance the transmissibility of viruses.

In public, Fauci has long insisted it was more likely the virus originated in nature than in a lab.

Trump said the media was engaged in its “first salvo on trying to save Fauci” after the release of the emails and added, “If people read those — so many e-mails, I mean I’ve never seen anything like it, you would almost say that’s all he could do, because how could you do so many emails? But when people read that, they will agree 100 percent. It was unfortunate.

“I got along with him, but I would say that if I listened to him, we would have had hundreds of thousands of more people die,” Trump said.

Watch above via Fox Business Network.