Former Trump White House advisor Steve Bannon told FNC’s Maria Bartiromo on “Sunday Morning Futures” that President Trump’s suggestion Saturday that maybe the Chinese government “deliberately” did not inform the world health organization or other countries about the early coronavirus outbreak. Bannon said China knew as early as December 2019 that the virus was spreading from human to human but told the world health organization in Mid-January that it was not. “This is about the Chinese Communist Party, and they are knowingly responsible for what happened,” he said. TRUMP: Now, the question was asked, would you be angry at China? Well, the answer might very well be a very resounding yes. But it depends. Was it a mistake that got out of control, or was it done deliberately, OK? There’s a big difference between those two. In either event, they should have let us go in. You know, we asked to go in very early, and they didn’t want us in. I think they were embarrassed. MARIA BARTIROMO: Steve, that was the first time the president actually publicly raised the question of, was it deliberate? I found that stunning. You haven’t heard the president raise such an issue before. Your reaction? STEVE BANNON: One of the key phrases the president used — and I think, if I was in Beijing, I’d be very nervous right now — he said, knowingly responsible, knowingly responsible. And I think — let’s set aside for a second, this is a biological Chernobyl. But let’s set aside a second the lab, and did it leak out of the lab with a technician on trying to find a vaccine? Let’s leave aside the fact that, were they doing gain of function experiments there, against everybody’s knowledge? Let’s leave aside for a second whether they have an offensive biological weapons program. That’s all going to be investigated. As Pompeo and Senator Cotton says, that’s all now being investigated by intelligence services, by the world’s health organizations, et cetera. Let’s go back to knowingly responsible. And let’s be precise. This is not the Chinese people and this is not China. The Chinese people, the decent, hardworking people of China, are the single biggest victims here. BARTIROMO: Yes. BANNON: This is about the Chinese Communist Party, and they are knowingly responsible for what happened. This is an act of commission. They knew, as a matter of fact, no later than the last week of December of 2019, they knew they had human-to-human transmission and community spread. Full interview: More transcript: BANNON: The free republic — the free Chinese and the republic of Taiwan – – Republic of China and Taiwan notified the World Health Organization on January 31. One of my broadcasting partners, Miles Guo, broadcast it on the 31st about human-to-human transmission. Most importantly, the great martyr of this process in China, Dr. Lee, and his colleagues in Wuhan, the doctors were on WeChat telling everybody, get ready, we have human-to- human transmission, they’re coming into the hospitals now. The Chinese Communist Party… BARTIROMO: Yes, let me show you this timeline. We have a timeline, because it was December 10, one of the earliest known coronavirus patients falling ill in Wuhan, China. And you’re right. The doctor raises the alarm on the coronavirus on December 30. What happens then, Steve? He gets arrested. He’s dead now, as you know, from coronavirus. BANNON: Well, he’s arrested. He’s also tortured. His family is put under surveillance. And they force him to sign a document that says he’s a rumor- monger, that these are lies, that there’s not human-to-human transmission, the Chinese Communist Party at the highest level. That is President Xi and Wang Qishan knowingly understood that they had human-to-human transmission. We also know now from Scott Gottlieb and also a report from a Chinese doctor at South Hampton University in the United Kingdom that, if they had acted like any human being would act, decent human, if they acted as late as the last week in December, 95 percent of all this wouldn’t have happened. That is the crime here. That’s the tragedy here. All the 40,000 Americans that will be dead by tomorrow morning, all the victims in Wuhan that could be tens or hundreds of thousands, all the dead in Lombardy, all the doctors and nurses, all the — the blood of all that is on the Chinese Communist Party’s hands, on Xi and Wang Qishan and their other gangsters. Also, the economic carnage. It’s going to take us decades to work our way out of here eventually. All of that is squarely on the Chinese Communist Party, not the Chinese people. Remember, there were hundreds of thousands of innocent Chinese flying all over the world in the month of January. They didn’t know that they had the virus. The Chinese Communist Party hid this. They hid it at the White House on the meetings on the 14th, when they signed. The World Health Organization put out a document on the 12th. And then they tweeted on the 14th after consultation with senior Chinese medical officials, there’s no human-to-human transmission, while they’re at the White House. Then they go to Davos. You’re one of the first ones to actually report this. They don’t tell anybody. And when they — and, actually, when they started to stop the trans — the traffic and the travel inside of China, they didn’t stop it to the rest of the world. It took Donald J. Trump, the 45th president of the United States, against his medical advisers’ opinion, because they were going off what the World Health Organization said. It was Trump that stopped the international travel on the 31st of January. The blood is on the hands of the Chinese Communist Party. And the world — for the Chinese people, the people of Wuhan and Hubei, the world must hold these people accountable. BARTIROMO: Will the world hold them accountable? I mean, the lying is continuing as we speak. Yesterday, at the president’s task force press conference, they showed a graphic of the mortality rate, Steve. I mean, it’s laughable to think that China is all the way at the bottom of this chart, when you have got so many cases across the world and deaths. Look at where China is. Are we supposed to believe that there are fewer deaths in China than anywhere in the world? BANNON: I think that was very powerful that President Trump actually interrupted Dr. Birx’s presentation, which he never does when she’s talking about numbers, to actually point out it’s so egregious. We had on our show yesterday from China people that are saying the urns themselves, they cremated the urns. And there’s 40,000 or 50,000 urns. They — the people in Wuhan think that there are probably over 100,000 people in Wuhan that died. And forget the rest of China. We don’t know, because they lie about everything. But you asked how they are going to be held accountable. The riotous indignation of the peoples of the world are going to stand up and make sure they are held accountable. President Trump laid it out. Knowingly responsible. They are knowingly responsible for the acts of commission, that all of this could have been avoided. Remember, 60 days ago, we had the greatest economy in American history. The whole world was prosperous. We were looking for a great 2020, a great kickoff to a decade. Now we’re looking at economic carnage and the largest mass casualty event in American history, caused by a biological Chernobyl and the lies, misrepresentations and the cover-up. Cotton, who couldn’t be on here today, calls its the biggest cover-up in world history. It’s incumbent upon the intelligence services, it’s incumbent upon the nations of the Earth to come together.
Stephen Kevin Bannon (born November 27, 1953) is an American media executive, political strategist, former investment banker, and the former executive chairman of Breitbart News. He served as White House Chief Strategist in the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump during the first seven months of Trump’s term. He served on the board of Cambridge Analytica, the data-analytics firm involved in the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal.
Bannon was an officer in the United States Navy for seven years in the late 1970s and early 1980s. After his military service, he worked at Goldman Sachs as an investment banker, and left as vice president. In 1993, he became acting director of the research project Biosphere 2. In the 1990s, he became an executive producer in Hollywood, and produced 18 films between 1991 and 2016. In 2007, he co-founded Breitbart News, a far-right website which he described in 2016 as