House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wants to investigate President Trump for his actions in the lead-up to the coronavirus outbreak in the U.S., but in February, she dismissed the threat with a visit to San Francisco’s Chinatown.
KPIX documented Pelosi’s February 24 visit to a fortune cookie factory and retailers:
“She has been talking to people along the way, a lot of business owners, a lot of community leaders here in Chinatown who have been concerned about the optics of the coronavirus,” reporter Anne Makovec said as the live shot showed Pelosi shaking hands with locals.
“She has been going around to show that it is perfectly safe to be here,” Makovec said.
“We want to be vigilant about what is out there in other places,” Pelosi said to reporters as her entourage packed the sidewalk. “We want to be careful about how we deal with it, be we do want to say to people, ‘Come to Chinatown. Here we are. We’re careful, safe. Come join us.'”
Makovec emphasized that there were no cases of coronavirus in the city at that point.
In another video, Pelosi told reporters, “Everything is fine here”:
She added, “The city is on top of the situation, and so it’s comfortable to be here.”
On Sunday, Pelosi struck a very different tone during an appearance on CNN:
The speaker slammed President Trump, claiming, “His denial at the beginning was deadly.”
She added, “I don’t know what the scientists are saying to him. I don’t know what the scientists said to him — when did the president know about this, and what did he know?”
“What did he know and when did he know it?” she asked, before raising the specter of an investigation.
“That’s for an after-action review. But as the president fiddles, people are dying,” she said.
Kyle Olson is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter and like him on Facebook.