Trump's failures 'massively exacerbated' the crisis — no matter how much he tries to blame China: Ex-national security official

On CNN Thursday, former national security official Jamie Metzl said that he welcomes the government investigation into whether the novel coronavirus originated in a Chinese laboratory — but emphasized that whatever failures occurred in China, President Donald Trump's inaction made it worse.

"We have to get to the bottom of this," said Metzl. "I'm not one to associate myself with President Trump or Secretary Pompeo or any of these guys, and I'm against anything that could be construed as nonconstructive or racist or intolerant. But we need to know what happened, not as an act of finger-pointing, but there could be other worse antigens out there."

"When there's a plane crash we say, wow, a plane crashed, that's really dangerous. If we don't get to the bottom of this quickly another plane could crash," added Metzl. "That's why we have to look at the failures in China, and the failures, frankly, here in the United States, because whatever the failures were in China, they were massively exacerbated by the failures of the Trump administration here."

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