AG Barr: China Far Bigger Threat Than Russia
Attorney General says country is waging a 'full-court blitzkrieg'
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Attorney General William Barr stated China is waging a “full-court blitzkrieg” against the political system in the United States.
Barr admitted that China is now posing a more substantial threat to the country than Russia.
Appearing on Fox News Channel’s The Ingraham Angle, said China is "trying to steal secrets at America's research universities and so forth."
The attorney general warned China posed a severe threat to the United States geopolitically, economically, and militarily.
China has also been accused of a cover-up and withholding vital information concerning the deadly coronavirus.
Last week, Trump's COVID-19 task force coordinator, Dr. Deborah Birx, admitted that they "didn’t know how contagious” coronavirus was due to holes in the data reported by China.
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China was accused of covering up the scale of the virus in its early stages in January, which many have argued took away valuable time in containing COVID-19.
"And so, we didn’t know how it was spreading. We didn’t know the surface contact," she admitted.
"We didn’t know how — I think the bottom line is, we didn’t know how contagious it was," she said.
"And I think when you make misassumptions around contagion early on, then you don’t prepare in the way that you should prepare for the level of contagion that this COVID-19 exhibits.”
Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus faced calls to resign after being accused of facilitating China's propaganda.
WATCH:
AG Bill Barr says China is "engaged in a full-court blitzkrieg of stealing American technology, trying to influence our political system, trying to steal secrets at our research universities and so forth. And we are focused on it. We have something we call the China Initiative." pic.twitter.com/E0T05teZBB
— (((Jason Rantz))) on KTTH Radio (@jasonrantz) April 9, 2020
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China has not been transparent about the origins and the nature of the global pandemic, which has infected 1.5 million and killed nearly 90,000 people globally.
A partial transcript is as follows:
LAURA INGRAHAM: "This virus originated in China; we still don’t have all the data; we still don’t really know about patient zero in China. A lot of that data is being withheld, still, from the United States, and top medical people are saying that."
"What about the Justice Department getting involved more, I guess obviously, to the American people in this battle against the ongoing propaganda machine of China in the United States at our universities, in businesses — hey, in the White House Press Room the other day."
ATTORNEY GENERAL WILLIAM BARR: "Yes, the Department is heavily engaged in that. In fact, that’s one of our highest priorities in the counterintelligence realm, counterespionage realm, and protection of trade secrets is our activity’s directed to defend against the Chinese."
"Chinese are engaged in a full-court blitzkrieg of stealing American technology, trying to influence our political system, trying to steal secrets at our research universities, and so forth — and we are focused on it. We have something we call the China Initiative.
"We’ve brought a lot of indictments, but it’s something that we also have to expose by letting the business community understand exactly the nature of the threat."
INGRAHAM: "Given what you know today about the panoply of abuses, internationally, against the United States, who is the bigger threat to America’s election security: Russia or China?"
ATTORNEY GENERAL BARR: "In my opinion it’s China. And not just to the election process, but I think across the board there’s simply no comparison. China is a very serious threat to the United States geopolitically, economically, militarily, and a threat to the integrity of our institutions, given their ability to influence things."
