In his final hours in office, President Joe Biden issued a preemptive, blanket legal pardon for Dr. Anthony Fauci, the most visible US health official during the Covid pandemic, for any and all actions he took from 2014 on, the same kind of pardon he granted his son Hunter Biden. Fauci, like Hunter Biden, thus literally rose above the law.
That’s what made today’s decision by Fauci to take the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination at a hearing of the Senate Homeland Security Committee so shocking.
After Fauci’s repeatedly invoked the Fifth, chairman Rand Paul told Fauci he would face “repercussions” for refusing to answer questions based on a valid congressional subpoena. Fauci attorney David Schertler then tried to address the committee but was cut off by Senator Paul, who said he was not recognized to speak. Paul then ordered security to remove Fauci’s lawyer from the committee room.
‘For Anthony Fauci, fearmongering was always an excellent career move’
Yesterday, Paul had responded to a reporter’s question about how he would respond to arguments he was trying to put Fauci in a position to perjure himself.
“There’s no risk to perjury if you tell the truth,” Paul said. “In fact, he can even admit to not telling the truth in the past. He can admit destroying records. He can admit to not adequately presenting both sides of equations, which isn’t really a crime. He can admit to anything. The only thing he can’t do is lie again.” He stipulated that Fauci had no right to obstruct a congressional inquiry.
But the story is much bigger than that. Fauci was appearing under subpoena to address grave questions of government accountability during the pandemic. In April, a federal grand jury indicted Fauci’s former senior advisor, David Morens, on felony charges for allegedly circumventing public records laws to conceal internal Covid emails.
As proof that Morens may have had something to hide, over the weekend Paul released a trove of pandemic-era diary entries by Fauci that document his thoughts as he dealt with the crisis and marinated in his new celebrity status as “America’s Doctor.” As early as January 2020, the dawn of Covid, Fauci wrote that early infections were “not connected to the [Wuhan wet] market” which he said was an “amplifier” rather than the source.
Fauci then repeatedly rejected the theory that the virus had been engineered in the Chinese government’s Wuhan laboratory, which had been conducting the kind of research that would risk the leak of man-made viruses. In 2021, Fauci testified under oath in the Senate that neither he nor the National Institutes of Health funded that research – only to be contradicted by NIH’s principal deputy director Lawrence Tabak. Perhaps that explains why President Biden granted Fauci a preemptive, blanket pardon, placing him above the law.
Fauci claimed he had nothing to do with school lockdowns, which did great damage to the education of millions of children. “I didn’t shut down anything,” he said on Fox News in 2022. “Show me a school that I shut down,” he said on another occasion. But in his diary, Fauci bragged that he personally convinced top officials in New York City and California – which contain a seventh of the US population – to close their schools.
For six years, Fauci has fended off his critics by deploying slippery answers and arrogant self-regard. He has scoffed at criticism, calling it “noise,” and asserted: “They’re really criticizing science because I represent science. That’s dangerous.”
But the new scandalous behavior revealed in the Fauci diaries is that which cuts closest to the vanity, self-importance and unaccountability of DC’s elite media. The diaries raise profound questions about insider power and the dangers of the media not questioning authority.
The 1,141 pages in the diary provide exhaustive detail on how the Beltway media bought into Fauci’s storyline, promoted him and covered up for his mistakes. Fauci clearly loved every minute of the ride: “My national and international fame is explosive and really unimaginable. It is not hyperbole to say that today I am the most famous and talked-about person in the country.”
Along with fame came the opportunity for Fauci to engage in cozy collaboration with his many media friends. He enjoyed several dinners with CNN anchor Jake Tapper, including a “relaxed” evening at Fauci’s house in October 2020 – just a week after he told Americans to “sacrifice” Thanksgiving that year. Earlier in 2020, Fauci wrote that Tapper had called him after an appearance on CNN: “Jake wanted to make sure the interview did not cause me any problems.”
Fauci notes interactions with other journalists he referred to as his “media friends.” “Yasmeen Abutaleb [of the Washington Post] has agreed to write a story trying to uncover the source of this organized effort to discredit me,” Fauci wrote in October 2021. The next day he wrote that Abutaleb was “getting very worked up about the fact that she realizes now that there is an organized effort to discredit me and she wants to use the investigative reporter capabilities of the Washington Post to try and find out if they can track funding for this effort to the Republican party or to any other organization that is trying to discredit me. Let us see how this turns out.”
Mark Halperin, a former political director of ABC News who now runs the interactive media platform 2Way, says the diaries reveal “the Dominant Media’s years of protection” of Fauci, despite his checkered track record during previous pandemics such as AIDS and his tendency to offer advice while citing no hard evidence. He questions why, even today, “so many of his former defenders continue to coddle and champion him… Have they reckoned with just how badly they got the story wrong?”
Halperin’s response is an emphatic no: “Now that the undeniable truth is staring them in the face they’re just saying ‘I love what the emperor is wearing’… How are you going to restore credibility to my profession for behaving in this crap way?”
The answer is that the media’s reaction to the Fauci diaries shows they are still either shoveling crap or whitewashing the revelations in them. Brian Stelter, CNN’s media critic, dismisses today’s Senate hearing as “predictable” and sniffs the Fauci diaries merely focus on his “documenting the objectively wild speed at which a government immunologist became internationally famous.”
There are some dissenting views. John Tierney, a former science columnist for the New York Times, was never impressed by Fauci. He told me “he was an amazing manipulator – had reporters eating out of his hand.” Fauci knew what gullible, ambitious reporters wanted to be fed – analysis that created a sense of crisis and bolstered their own biases. Tierney says Fauci even produced a 2024 memoir that was “a masterclass in how to get away with it. For Anthony Fauci, fearmongering was always an excellent career move.”
Now that their Covid superhero has been exposed, Washington’s media enforcers have decided that their best career move is to ignore the furor until it dies down while continuing to discredit Fauci’s critics.
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