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Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., defended himself on Friday as MSNBC anchor Stephanie Ruhle asked him "why on earth" he would tweet that journalists found "glee" in U.S. coronavirus cases outnumbering China's.
"Some in our media can’t contain their glee & delight in reporting that the U.S. has more #CoronaVirus cases than #China," Rubio tweeted on Sunday. "Beyond being grotesque, its bad journalism We have NO IDEA how many cases China really has but without any doubt its significantly more than why they admit to." The tweet received plenty of backlash but Rubio stood by his statement during his MSNBC interview.
Ruhle seemed incredulous when she asked Rubio about this tweet. “I need to ask you this, because I’m a journalist. We’re not just some personalities. You called out journalism. And I need to understand why on earth you did this.”
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Rubio replied: “Well, because there are some journalists that were doing exactly what I said."
Rubio had tweeted out a series of posts showing journalists mocking the administration and America's interest in being "Number 1."
She went on to suggest that Rubio was engaging in the same kind of finger-pointing that he condemned in others. Rubio responded by indicating that journalists were threatening national security by trusting Chinese figures.
"Yeah, but the difference is that this is an ongoing deal here, with what we're dealing with right now," Rubio said, "and that is a Chinese propaganda effort to put out that they have handled this perfectly and we have not -- and ... the national security and the national interest of the United States does not stop."
He added that people were "taking the Chinese number of 80-something thousand infections and saying, 'look how great they did it and look how bad we're doing it' -- and that's not only wrong, that's a national security issue. We know that that is a propaganda-influenced effort that they're undertaking, along with Putin in Russia and even the Iranians. And national security and the national interest of this country does not stop -- that's an ongoing concern even amidst this crisis."
CLICK HERE FOR COMPLETE CORONAVIRUS COVERAGE
Skepticism about China’s numbers has swirled throughout the crisis, fueled by official efforts to quash bad news in the early days and a general distrust of the government. Long lines of people waiting to collect the ashes of loved ones at funeral homes last week revived the debate.
There is no smoking gun pointing to a cover-up by China’s ruling Communist Party. But intentional or not, there is reason to believe that more people died of COVID-19 than the official tally, which stood at 3,312 at the end of Tuesday.
In a classified report released to the White House, three U.S. intelligence officers concluded that China has concealed the extent of the coronavirus outbreak in its country, underreporting both total cases and fatalities from the disease.
Bloomberg, which first wrote about the report, cited the officers who they said they alerted the White House last week to Beijing's misleading numbers. Two of the three sources called the numbers flat-out fake.
Fox News' Barnini Chakraborty and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
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