Robert O’Brien Praises Trump for ‘Courageous’ Decision To Ban China Travel

‘What we didn’t realize is the Chinese would continue to allow folks to travel from Wuhan’

RUSH EXCERPT:

O’BRIEN: “Well, one of the things we did and I think one- again a story that has not been focused on enough is- is when we raised this issue really for the first time really vehemently with President Trump on January 28 with respect to the China travel ban, within two days, even though many of his advisers urged against it, the president made a hard decision and cut off travel from China within two days of- of learning that this was a serious, serious outbreak. And that saved countless lives. What we- what we didn’t know at the time, and I, by the way, after cutting off travel from China, I called my counterparts, the other national security advisors in Europe and urged them to take similar action. What we didn’t realize is the Chinese would continue to allow folks to travel from Wuhan. Even though they’d cut off travel within China, they allowed those folks to travel from China to Europe and to seed the disease in Europe and then have it come through a backdoor into the United States. So, look, in hindsight, perfect hindsight, when we realized the Europeans hadn’t cut off travel and when we really, you know, we didn’t know at the time, but we later learned that the Chinese allowed folks to continue to travel from Wuhan to- to Europe, sure, it would have been better to cut it off early. But what I want to focus on are literally the hundreds of thousands or millions of lives that were saved because President Trump made a decision that was entirely courageous at a time when the IC and others did not believe that this was a serious health risk or even a global pandemic.”

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