From Fauci to Big Tech, GOP already has clear investigative targets if it wins back Congress

Ohio Republican Rep. Jim Jordan is the most likely candidate to take over the House Judiciary Committee if the GOP wins back Congress next year. Ask him what he wants to investigate and who he wants to subpoena, and he doesn't hesitate. Not even for even a second.

"Fauci," he told Just the News, referring to Dr. Anthony Fauci, the U.S. infectious disease specialist overseeing America's pandemic response.

While the many conflicting messages and reversals of the pandemic response are ripe for investigation, Republicans like Jordan also want to press Fauci about why America was funding China's bat research on coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology through a U.S. nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance and why NIH revived a dangerous form of experimentation known as gain of function in 2017.

"You know, Dr. Fauci knew on January 31 2020, that [the COVID-19 outbreak] most likely came from a lab," Jordan said during an interview with the John Solomon Reports podcast. "He got an email from Dr. Christian Anderson, which said the virus looks engineered, the virus is not consistent with evolutionary theory. That is a fancy way of saying this thing came from the lab, and yet he misled us for over the last year saying, 'Oh, no, no, no, that's not the case.' He got articles written and everything else. So we need to investigate that."

Fauci disputes some of the Republican theories but acknowledges the lab leak theory is a possibility even as he and other NIH scientists still argue natural evolution is a more likely explanation for the COVID scourge the world now suffers. But Jordan knows there's a populist reason to dig into the China mess.

"The idea that we're funding, we're paying people in China to do this kind of research is frightening," he said.

The 2022 midterm elections are still more than 10 months away, and lots of history remains to be written. But President Joe Biden's rapidly falling popularity, the continuing inflation and COVID crises, and a large number of Democratic incumbent retirements have Republicans scheming and dreaming about what they would investigate should they win the chairmen's gavels.

Axios reported Sunday that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is already planning to send document preservation orders to several Biden administration agencies to retain evidence for investigations. The news site suggested McCarthy has seven major investigations already planned.

Jordan, as a likely chairman of the main law enforcement oversight committee, would oversee several of the probes.

He told Just the News that in addition to Fauci's China connections, he'd also like to investigate Attorney General Merrick Garland's order asking the FBI to investigate parents as a domestic threat for protesting school board curriculum decisions, and the continued censorship of Americans by Big Tech. On the latter, Jordan hopes to reform the Section 230 immunity from lawsuits many giants like Facebook, Google and Twitter currently enjoy.

"We got to get to the bottom of the the school board's issue, what the Justice Department is doing, how they're treating it," the Ohio Republican said  "This threat tag label that we got from a whistleblower they're putting on parents is frightening as well. So those are some of the big investigations. And then, frankly, it's going to be tough to get anything passed into law, but we should still go ahead and pass it out of the House.

"And you know, Joe Biden would veto it, but we need to pass section 230 [reform], which takes away the liability protection for these ... Big Tech platforms who always want to squelch and censor conservatives." 

McCarthy reportedly has several other targets including:

• The leak of a vast cache of IRS documents about billionaires to ProPublica;
• National Security Agency's possible monitoring or unmasking of journalists like Fox News host Tucker Carlson;
• The record surge of illegal aliens crossing the southern U.S. border;
• The bungled withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, including the stranding of Americans and Afghan supporters;
• The controversial JEDI cloud-computing contract at the Pentagon that pits Microsoft against Jeff Bezos' Amazon Cloud Services.

Many Republicans also believe a more thorough investigation into Hunter Biden's business deals and his father's knowledge of them is warranted. Sens. Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley completed a preliminary probe before the 2020 election, but there have been numerous revelations since, many from a laptop Hunter Biden left at a computer repair shop, a device that is now in the FBI's hands.

Peter Navarro, former President Donald Trump's trade and manufacturing adviser, said the laptop's revelations about the extent of the Biden family's business interests in China raise serious concerns about whether President Biden is too compromised to negotiate with Beijing.

"I think the laptop from hell, Hunter Biden's laptop from hell kind of is the big reveal," Navarro told Just the News. "Hunter Biden is going over to Communist China and leveraging the political fame of Daddy there. Look, we don't have a China policy in the Biden administration, we simply have appeasement."