[JustTheNews] "How come you don't know anything?" GOP member asks Assistant Secretary of Legislation Melanie Egorin. Another floats cutting her travel funds and salary.
The Department of Health and Human Services is like a child who steals a cookie and, when asked if he stole it, answers "I know there used to be a cookie there."
The chairman of the House's Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic used that analogy to describe a top agency official's explanation at a hearing Wednesday for allegedly "stonewalling" document requests for nearly a year by the chamber's GOP majority.
Assistant Secretary for Legislation Melanie Egorin showed up at the committee's hearing after HHS canceled her scheduled Sept. 28 transcribed interview the day before, claiming she had COVID-19, according to the Nov. 2 subpoena from Chairman Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio.
Egorin repeatedly claimed her staff "responded" or had been "responsive" to GOP demands to see its materials on COVID origins, the science behind vaccine policies and school reopening discussions.
But Wenstrup called her written testimony "somewhat insulting" by touting 30,000 pages that HHS has turned over this Congress, ignoring that HHS gave a single subcommittee in the previous Democrat-controlled Congress 43,000 pages.
The 10,000 pages turned over to Wenstrup's subcommittee – 1,000 of them Tuesday night – included "hundreds of pages" of public news articles as well as heavily redacted communications and simply irrelevant information, the chairman said.
"Responses are not the same as answers," said Wenstrup, like many of the members a physician. "You could just as soon hand us a physiology book."
| Not quite a transcript of of the discussion, but close. |
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