Fox News host Tucker Carlson on his Friday program built on previous reporting regarding the Biden administration’s “funding” of several “secretive biolabs in Ukraine” that conduct research and experimentation on “highly dangerous pathogens,” research that the administration and the United Nations both have vehemently denied is taking place.
The host’s coverage of the labs comes amid accusations by Russia that the labs exist as well as Moscow’s push for more information regarding them as its forces drive deeper into Ukraine following a late February invasion.
As he began his program, Carlson noted that the story wasn’t one he wanted to do and that initially, it sounded “so over-the-top and bizarre” that “we didn’t think it could be true.” He added that the administration “very aggressively denied” the allegations while attacking “anyone who has questions about it as a tool of Russia.”
“We foolishly assumed that in this one instance, they might be telling the truth and then out of nowhere, the Biden official in charge of Ukraine confirmed the story. Toria Nuland, the Under Secretary of State, casually mentioned in a Senate hearing on Tuesday that actually, yes, the Biden administration does fund a series of biolabs in Ukraine, and whatever is in these labs is so dangerous that she is deeply concerned these materials will fall into the hands of the Russian military,” Carlson said.
Now, that struck us as a shocking development. Once again, not for the first time, what had seemed like a nutty conspiracy theory turned out to be true. Toria Nuland’s testimony raised at least two immediate questions. What exactly are these labs doing with our money and in our name? And why didn’t the Biden administration secure the contents of these labs before the Russians invaded?” he continued, adding:
So far, we haven’t received any answer at all to the second question. We think we’re the only ones who have even asked it. Whoever decided to leave deadly biological materials sitting in Ukraine as Russian troops massed on the border has not yet been identified. We hope that person will be identified. We’ll keep asking.
As for the first question, what exactly is going on in these labs? We’ve gotten several answers, all of them insulting. Initially, the administration claimed the labs were designed to help the Ukrainians fight tuberculosis, as well as various livestock diseases.
That’s what officials told members of Congress. It didn’t seem plausible and, in fact, it’s not plausible. And then after our show last night, the Pentagon released what it non-ironically called a fact sheet designed to make the biolab story seem small and ridiculous. Virtually every news organization in America, with almost no exceptions, repeated the administration’s claim verbatim with no verification of any kind.
Carlson then noted that media outlets including Foreign Policy Magazine, which is left-leaning, as well as the equally left-wing Washington Post, ran ‘fact checks’ that claimed the operations were part of a “threat reduction” initiative begun in the mid-2000s after the fall of the Soviet Union to secure and eliminate biological weapons.
“That makes sense, but wait. 2005 was 17 years ago. How long does it take to eliminate Soviet bioweapons? Seventeen years seems like a long time,” he said.
“If you had 17 years and ample funding from Congress, you could probably remove and catalog every grain of sand on Waikiki Beach, and yet somehow, over that same period 17 years, the Pentagon has not finished removing test tubes from Soviet-era freezers,” Carlson noted further.
“How does that work exactly? How heavy are these bioweapons? Do we lack the transportation capacity to get them out of Ukraine and bury them in the desert in Nevada? When was the Pentagon planning to finish this important job? In 20 years? In 50 years? Those all seem like very obvious questions, but not a single reporter asked any of those questions,” said the Fox News host.
He went on to note that a CNN.com report said that the U.S. was working to “secure old Soviet weapons,” which he indicated was a red flag.
“Ok, secure, not eliminate, which raises the question: what does it mean to secure a bioweapon? And again, why has it taken 17 years to do it? And by the way, if these are really just old Soviet weapons, why is Toria Nuland so worried they will wind up in the hands of old Soviets who presumably already have these very same weapons—probably don’t need more. It’s absurd when you think about it,” he added.
Carlson then hit the media and the Biden administration for claiming anyone who has legitimate questions about the programs in Ukraine is a Russian asset. He also noted that no one in the administration seems willing to offer any explanations, so his team did some research on their own.
“The day after Russia invaded Ukraine, Robert Pope, the man who heads the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program at DOD, sat for an interview with the website Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Pope was the man in charge of securing or eliminating Soviet-era bioweapons, so he knows a lot about the subject, maybe more than anyone else, but it turns out that not all of these Soviet weapons are being destroyed or even secured, and Pope acknowledged that in the interview, which apparently CNN didn’t see,” said Carlson, adding:
According to his interview, Pope said the labs “may hold pathogen strains left over from the Soviet bioweapons program preserved in freezers for research purposes.” Pope said that “scientists, being scientists, it wouldn’t surprise me if some of these strange collections and some of these laboratories still have pathogen strains that go all the way back to the origins of that program.”
In other words, because as Pope put it, “scientists are scientists,” they don’t want to destroy all the bioweapons. Instead, they’re using them to conduct new bioweapons research. That’s what he said and not just on strains left over from the Soviet Union. The second lie. In fact, the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv has acknowledged joint American and Ukrainian research on other pathogens such as hemorrhagic fever virus. Apparently, there’s a lot of this going on in Ukraine funded by the United States. Did you know that? Why Ukraine? We don’t know. We can only guess.
He also said the Obama administration in 2010 funded the construction of a new Level 3 biolab in Odessa, Ukraine, but again, the purpose wasn’t to “secure” old Soviet bioweapons.
“That lab was designed for research a new and ‘especially dangerous pathogens’ in Ukraine, the poorest country in Europe. Again, not a hotbed of biomedical research. Why Ukraine? We don’t know. Someone should find out,” said Carlson, before noting that the White House is also selling the ‘Russian propaganda’ line to anyone who questions the ‘official explanation.’
“Why is the United States funding these biolabs that are not doing anything close to what the Pentagon claims they are doing? Why is the White House press secretary from the podium contradicting what the director of the Pentagon’s bioweapons control program has already admitted is true? Why is she doing that and how should we feel about all of this? Insulted, but also very concerned. There is absolutely a story here, a story that matters, clearly. That’s why they’re lying about it,” he concluded.
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