by Matthew Boyle, Breitbart:

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) ripped establishment U.S. media outlets who have mischaracterized his comments on the origins of the coronavirus outbreak plaguing China and the world during an exclusive interview with Breitbart News this week.

Cotton, who this past weekend during an appearance on Maria Bartiromo’s Fox News Channel program Sunday Morning Futures laid out how Communist China has not been honest about the origins of the coronavirus, has been the subject of vicious attacks from establishment media in the U.S. as a result.

In particular, during the Bartiromo interview, Cotton specifically said there is not evidence to suggest that the coronavirus originated in a high-security biochemical lab the Chinese Communist Party government operates in Wuhan. But since the government’s original official story about the virus’s origin is collapsing under scrutiny, the senator argued that the question needs to be asked—and that that theory, along with several other more plausible virus origin theories than the Communists’ original and likely false claim that the virus originated in a food market, need to be pursued. Cotton argued that the Communists must allow internationally renowned independent western experts into China to investigate the matter.

“We don’t have evidence that this disease originated there but because of China’s duplicity and dishonesty from the beginning, we need to at least ask the question to see what the evidence says, and China right now is not giving evidence on that question at all,” Cotton said in the Bartiromo interview.

Cotton has been aggressive in his criticism of Communist China on coronavirus, as he was in the Fox News interview and in this exclusive interview with Breitbart News. He was also the first U.S. senator to call for President Donald Trump’s administration to extend a temporary travel ban to China in order to protect Americans from the disease—which he did in another Breitbart News exclusive a few weeks ago.

In his interview with Breitbart News on Monday, Cotton—who is also launching a new effort to back conservative Republican veterans for Congress—called on China to allow western experts into Wuhan province in China to investigate coronavirus and its origins.

“Of course the Chinese Communist Party needs to be open and transparent, and they have not been from the beginning as they still refuse to be,” Cotton said. “Just in the past couple days, they released a so-called secret speech from Chairman Xi that he supposedly gave in early January to demonstrate how on top of matters he was blaming the local officials—an endemic problem to communist government. It was like a parody of historical revisionism, like old-school Marxist Leninists. What the Chinese Communist Party needs to do is open up to internationally recognized experts—not Iranian experts or even Russian ones, but European and American and Canadian and Japanese—where there’s no question of their credentials or their integrity and allow them into Wuhan, allow them into the food market, and allow them into the super laboratory in Wuhan so they can figure out exactly where this virus came from and we can glean lessons from that to develop effective diagnostic testing and vaccines.”

But perhaps more importantly than that, Cotton laid out how the establishment media—much of which has accused him of spreading conspiracy theories about the coronavirus—is “spouting” Chinese Communist Party propaganda.

“The second point you make though is about the media, and this is yet again a gross form of mainstream media bias—they are spouting the party line, and in this case it is the Communist Party line,” Cotton told Breitbart News. “They are doing everything they can to be apologists for the Chinese Communist Party when in fact it is in the Communist Party system of government that has inflicted this outbreak upon the world—and most importantly upon their own people. The Chinese people, after all, are the first and worst victims of the Communist Party government in China. It’s time the media start directing these questions not at skeptics in Washington, but begin directing their skepticism towards Chinese apparatchiks in Beijing.”

For instance, after the Fox News interview with Bartiromo, the Washington Post’s Paulina Firozi wrote a piece that in the headline says Cotton “keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked.”

WATCH THE FULL COTTON INTERVIEW WITH BARTIROMO:

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