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 about the origins of the pandemic. The diaries, Paul says, are evidence of this.
They are not. They are personal and professional contemporaneous notes from a pandemic. In parts Fauci marvels at his own fame. He calls himself an “international celebrity.” He records the Zoom call Kim Kardashian arranged in April 2020 so he could address three dozen actors, singers, and athletes (Demi Lovato and Michael Jordan among them). He worries, in writing, that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s forthcoming book about him will be “almost certainly slanderous.” He was not wrong to worry. None of these journal entries were proof that the novel coronavirus was Fauci’s fault. Nor did these journals substantiate Paul’s fevered position that the virus was man made.
In fact, on the question Paul actually cares about, the entries cut the other way. In a February 1, 2020 note about a call with prominent scientists, Fauci writes there “was not total agreement” on where the virus came from. Elsewhere he writes that he is almost certain the virus jumped naturally from another species to a human, while keeping an open mind about a lab leak, and that two possibilities being available does not make them equally likely. This uncertainty is science in real time. Shifting consensus and skepticism is science. But through Paul’s paranoid lens, he reads it as a cover-up. He scheduled a committee vote on holding Fauci in contempt for next week and conceded, in the same breath, the limit of his own power. “All I can do is recommend the prosecution,” Paul said. “I can’t initiate prosecution.” And here my premise of Paul wanting a prosecution takes on life.
Paul rests his accusations on “gain of function” research, a broad term for experiments that give an organism a new or stronger ability. In the lab, that can mean making a virus more transmissible or more lethal. This is done to study how pathogens might evolve. Natural gain of function, if you will. Gain of function research in a lab can provide answers on how to counter them before they do it on their own.
The work is legitimate and regulated. This is not to say that gain of function research carries no risk. It does. The same experiment that might help mitigate an outbreak can, in theory, create one.
There is the narrow regulatory definition, which triggers specific federal oversight, and there is the loose colloquial one, which covers nearly any experiment that makes a bug more dangerous. Paul alleges NIAID funded gain of function work in Wuhan under the colloquial meaning. Fauci has testified that the funded work did not meet the regulatory meaning. Both can be technically true at once. That is why Paul keeps chasing a perjury charge. And it is also the reason that Fauci kept taking the Fifth. And before anyone starts to say that only the guilty assert their Fifth Amendment right (and wait for it), it is important to consider this case as a reason why they do. What is clear is that Paul and a few of his senatorial peers are looking to gin up a mob in a time of sinking GOP poll numbers. And of course, with Fauci taking the Fifth, it gave a few of the usual suspects the floor to start tossing the red meat to the base.
It was no surprise that Josh Hawley opened with a variation of a taunt we all knew was coming. “Nothing says honesty like taking the fifth, huh, doc?” He asked Fauci what day of the week it was. Fauci took the Fifth. He asked the color of the carpet. Fauci took the Fifth. Hawley, who had come prepared to argue that Biden’s pardon strips Fauci of the privilege in the first place, moved from the legal nuance of taking the Fifth when you have immunity to the personal. “You became a narcissist and a megalomaniac and a liar,” he said, “and you’ve lied to the American people, and you’ve lied to this body, and you’ve disgraced your profession by doing it.” It was Josh at his sanctimonious best.
Ron Johnson wanted to know whether Fauci had lied in his own diary. Fauci declined to say. Paul had one of Fauci’s attorneys, David Schertler, removed from the room by Capitol Police after the lawyer spoke without being recognized. It was a disgrace that accomplished nothing but provide a reminder of just how vicious American politics have become. It was also another brutal blow to public health as this administration and the Republican Party continue to attack science on any front available to them.
Tommy Tuberville saved his material for the cameras outside. On Newsmax, the Alabama senator, who is running for governor, called Fauci a fool and said he should be “locked up before he leaves this building today and put in prison, and then put on trial in front of the American people.” He put Alabama’s pandemic dead at twenty to thirty thousand and said he hoped every one of them would sue. Imagine that courtroom with the number of Ouija boards needed. He promised to explore whether a governor could drag Fauci to an Alabama courtroom. By evening, on Fox Business, the number had grown. Tuberville said Fauci “killed, or had something to do with killing, 9 million people.” Host Liz MacDonald cut in. “Yeah, we can’t prove that, right?”
They cannot. Strip away the lack of integrity of these southern wingnuts (Tommy’s no brain trust, he was a coach, so let’s give him a pass on his profound stupidity when it comes to the law), but Hawley is a lawyer and knew how to skin this cat if that is what he really wanted. As mentioned before, Fauci was pardoned by Joe Biden in January 2025 for any conduct before that date, which is precisely why the Fifth is the fight now. The open legal question is whether a pardon eliminates the privilege, and thus whether the silence itself is a crime. James Lankford raised the Lois Lerner precedent, the IRS official held in contempt after she gave an opening statement and then refused to answer. Fauci gave an opening statement and then refused to answer. Next week’s vote is designed to send that question to a court. But this is not what these men want. Not the truth. What they want is a scapegoat. They want to have something they can go home with and show they have the bloody scalp of someone who did not do the bidding of a wacko president during a pandemic that was mismanaged. The strategy is more important today than ever.
As Republicans continue to support Trump and his failing policies (be it his terrorizing the world with invasion or wrecking the world economy with his idiot war), they are desperate not to address it. Instead they are using a tried and true play: they are so much worse than we are.
And of course this circus works for Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the man who released the so-called “diaries.”
On Fox News he claimed that he found them, spread across eleven government servers where they had been, in his telling, “sequestered and secreted.” As if he were Colonel Mustard in the Library holding a candlestick. They were on a government server. Not stashed, erased, or private. Another sensational RFK Jr. claim. And then it was he who handed them to Paul and Johnson before the hearing. How the notes traveled from those servers to Sen. Paul’s website before the hearing remains unexplained.
Of course Kennedy was in his paranoid glory. His 2021 book, “The Real Anthony Fauci,” accused Fauci of orchestrating “a historic coup d’état against Western democracy” and of fronting a Fauci-Gates “vaccine cartel” that suppressed cheap treatments to sell shots. In his book, Kennedy, not a doctor, pushed debunked treatments like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. The book, while selling well, was fact-checked and showed, unsurprisingly, that many of Kennedy’s claims were false.
The two men have loathed each other openly for years. Fauci, recalling an early meeting where Kennedy pressed him on vaccines, once said, “I don’t know what’s going on in his head, but it’s not good.” In 2024, Fauci went after Kennedy during his presidential run, exposing his false claims and how his claims around vaccine safety are dangerous. And of course once appointed as Secretary of Health and Human Services, he did cut vaccine access from inside the government. And Kennedy is not just satisfied with Fauci’s retirement; he sought to rid the agency of Fauci’s NIAID successor, Jeanne Marrazzo, who alleges Kennedy removed her illegally. There is a lawsuit pending.
After the hearing, Kennedy posted a doctored photo to his official government account: Fauci in the foreground, Kennedy behind him, holding handcuffs. On his personal account he promoted his book. Nothing like making a little on side.
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Fauci looked like a total idiot during the hearing. By defending him, so do you!