WASHINGTON — President Trump has confirmed Dr. Anthony Fauci will testify next week in front of a Senate coronavirus committee — but not before the House, which he called “a bunch of Trump-haters.”
“The House is a set-up. The House is a bunch of Trump-haters. They put every Trump-hater on the committee — the same old stuff,” the president told reporters at the White House on Tuesday morning.
The White House last week blocked Fauci — the highly respected director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases — from appearing as a witness before Congress, but Trump on Tuesday reversed that decision.
Fauci will now testify next week before the Republican-controlled Senate after the White House said he was too busy dealing with the pandemic to appear.
The last time Fauci testified before the House Oversight Committee in March, he countered the administration and said the federal government had failed when it came to testing.
The House last month established the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis to police Trump’s coronavirus response efforts, which the president blasted as a “witch hunt.”
Members of the panel include Oversight Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), Financial Services Committee Chairwoman Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) and Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-SC).
Trump on Tuesday accused Democrats of wanting his administration to fail and said the House panel had been stacked with lawmakers who were hostile to him.
“They frankly want our situation to be unsuccessful which means death, which means death,” Trump said before departing the White House for a tour of a Honeywell factory producing N95 masks in Phoenix, Arizona.
“The House has put on an oversight committee by Maxine Waters and [Carolyn] Maloney and the same people and it’s just a set-up,” he continued.
“But Dr. Fauci will be testifying in front of the Senate and he looks forward to doing that.”
In an exclusive Oval Office interview on Tuesday, the president singled out Maloney and said the Democratic New York congresswoman had turned her back on him after he was a donor in her early political career.
“Carolyn Maloney, you know, I used to be with her. I was like one of her first contributors. She thanked me profusely,” he said.
“I helped to get her elected when she first ran years ago and then I run for office and she’s become hostile because that’s politically correct, but actually it’s stupid.”
