WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he doesn’t want to let Dr. Anthony Fauci, one of his top advisers on the coronavirus crisis, testify in the House because he said its members are "a bunch of Trump haters."
"The House is a setup, the House is a bunch of Trump haters. They put every Trump hater on the committee, the same old stuff. They frankly want our situation to be unsuccessful which means death, which means death. And our situation's going to be very successful," Trump told reporters outside the White House as he departed for Arizona.
The White House is blocking Fauci from testifying before the House on Wednesday about the administration's coronavirus response. White House spokesman Judd Deere last week called the timing of the hearing "inappropriate" and said it would be "counterproductive" to have Fauci testify amid his work with the coronavirus task force.
Democrats have said that they want to hear testimony from task force members such as Fauci to assess the response to COVID-19 and why the level of testing still hasn’t been scaled up. Fauci is the head of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
The White House said it would allow Fauci to testify at a Senate Health Committee hearing on May 12, a spokesperson for the committee chairman, Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., told NBC News.
"Dr. Fauci will be testifying in front of the Senate and he looks forward to doing that," Trump said Tuesday. "But the House, I will tell you, the House, they should be ashamed of themselves and frankly the Democrats should be ashamed because they don't want us to succeed. They want us to fail so they can win an election which they're not going to win."
