'Magical thinking': Jamie Raskin wrecks GOP's Covid hearing by scorching Trump

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) blasted a House Select Committee on Covid-19 by noting that former President Donald Trump had refused for months to investigate the virus's origins but praised China President Xi Jinping instead.

At a hearing to determine the origins of Covid on Wednesday, Raskin wondered why Republicans were not more upset with Trump's mishandling of the pandemic.

"The COVID-19 pandemic came to America in 2020, of course, when Donald Trump was president," Raskin told the committee. "And that president's policy failures, magical thinking, and total recklessness caused, according to his own special advisor on COVID, Deborah Birx, the unnecessary death of hundreds of thousands of Americans."

Raskin said that answers "must come from objective, fact-based investigations informed by doctors, scientists, and public health experts."

"Whatever the origins of COVID-19, whether it is bats or bureaucrats, no finding will ever exonerate or rehabilitate Donald Trump for his lethal recklessness in mismanaging the crisis in America, which cost us more than a million lives," he continued. "Indeed, if COVID was actually the product of a lab leak, or the worst bioweapon of mass destruction ever invented, as some have argued, and obviously we don't have the scientific evidence to say any of this yet, it would not only not remove Donald Trump's culpability, it would only deepen his culpability in the most profound way."

The congressman offered a list of tweets in which Donald Trump praised Xi in the early days of the pandemic.

"I'm just giving the committee a tiny taste of Donald Trump's fawning, star-struck, sycophantic embrace of everything the Chinese government was telling him in 2020," he explained. "He could have directed the intelligence community to lead a COVID-19 origins investigation back in March of 2020, three years ago. He did not. He wasted precious time minimizing the risk of the virus and lavishing his praise on President Xi."

Raskin concluded: "He could have pushed back against the CCP for interfering with the WHO's investigation into its origins, and he could have asked our intelligence community to intervene. He did none of those things. And everyone should remember that. Let's take the politics out of it, and let's get to the bottom of what happened."

Watch the video below from the U.S. House.