Was it Dr. Fauci in the Library With a Candlestick?

The cast of ususal republican suspects served up a sloppy show that proved nothing except there is no bottom to this swamp.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, sat before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee under subpoena yesterday and said almost nothing.

In his opening statement, he announced he would invoke the Fifth Amendment. Then he did it again. And again. By the end of the morning, he had declined to answer more than fifty times, reading the same sentence on the advice of counsel.

It was good legal advice. The junior senator from Kentucky, Rand Paul, himself a physician, has been on a mission, not merely to persecute Fauci, but to prosecute him.

Paul opened the week by releasing more than 1,100 pages of what he called “Tony’s Diary,” near-daily notes he says Fauci kept from late 2019 through 2022. A 465-page “prequel” of older records and emails came with it. Paul’s theory, which he has maintained for years without evidence, is that Fauci greenlit dangerous research in a Wuhan lab, watched it escape, and lied …