Fauci Agonistes: It’s Time to End the Republican Witch Hunt

The right danced a jig of joy over Dr. Anthony Fauci’s invoking the Fifth Amendment before Rand Paul’s Senate Homeland Security Committee.

The Kentucky Republican knew in advance that Fauci would give no substantive testimony. Yet he paraded the 85-year-old doctor before the cameras to invoke his Fifth Amendment rights over a hundred times, then warned him of “repercussions” for refusing to answer. Judges often instruct juries that they may draw no adverse inference from a witness’s invocation of his constitutional rights, but Paul seemed to forget this in his admonition.

Fauci’s great crime: He served his country during the COVID crisis, acting as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from 1984 to 2022 and as Chief Medical Advisor to the President from 2021 to 2022, a position handed him by a fellow named Donald Trump. Trump made Fauci the face of the government’s response to the COVID pandemic. But ironically, he has become a hate figure for the MAGAs who would politicize medicine and scientific research.

“DR. NO,” gloated the tabloid headline in Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post reporting on Fauci’s appearance before the Committee. “Fauci invokes Fifth Amendment a shocking 111 times, denying Americans answers about Covid failures.” And Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal featured a front-page picture of a pursed-lipped Fauci under a Headline “Fauci Refuses to Answer Senators’ Covid Queries.”

Paul released Fauci’s personal diary to the public. It is always dangerous to keep a diary. It can and will be used against you. Job lamented, “Oh, that mine enemy had written a book!” It means that adversaries, giving you written evidence of their thoughts, provide damning ammunition that may be used against them. Diaries often express uncurated feelings and opinions that the diarist might later find embarrassing. Writing your diary on a government computer would seem like a particularly bad idea.

Portions of Fauci’s diary are certainly unflattering to the author. Whose personal diary isn’t? While containing notes about the COVID-19 health crisis he managed and the players he dealt with along the way, much of his musing is about himself. On Jan. 6, 2020, he writes of a “Super A list” party he attended. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi hugs and kisses him and tells everyone “how great I am.” Strange he would brag about this.

Is Fauci showing a bit of vainglory? Undoubtedly. But compare that with this Trumpian braggadocio: “And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.” In this culture, can you fairly rubbish this second-generation Italian American from Brooklyn for taking the Fifth and noting in his diary, “All my friends kept saying I was a national hero” and that they “‘felt safe in my arms’?” Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan did. She oddly likened the Fauci hearing to “congressional hearings on la Cosa Nostra, and the head of one of the five families is fiddling with his diamond pinkie ring as he asserts his right not to incriminate himself.”

At the hearing, Fauci accused Paul of a “campaign of slander” against him, an “unhinged obsession” with putting him in jail. He’s right. Fauci received a broad pardon from Joe Biden before he left office, to spare him criminal prosecution and congressional witch hunts such as these. Fauci’s only criminal exposure would appear to be for perjury before the committee. But given Paul’s obsessions and so many GOP officials saying he belongs in jail, including the anti-vax Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who wrote a monomaniacal bestseller about the good doctor, Fauci was wise to invoke the Fifth Amendment as advised by his lawyer, the well know white collar criminal defense attorney, David Schertler who was ejected from the committee room by Paul for having the temerity to address the committee.

Taking the Fifth Amendment is not a left-wing preserve. Roy Cohn advised his clients to do it all the time. Trump took the Fifth more than 440 times in an inquiry by the New York State Attorney General into asset valuations, loans, and documents involved in his business activities.

The Fifth Amendment is never a badge of admitted criminality, although in the Senator Joe McCarthy era it stood as such. The Constitution says that no person “shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself,” and that has been a privilege guaranteed to all of us since 1791.

And refusing to answer questions put by a congressional committee isn’t a stigma either. Respected lawyer Jay Clayton, Trump’s second pick for Director of National Intelligence following the resignation of Tulsi Gabbard, came before the Senate Intelligence Committee. Reviewing his qualifications for the job, Senator John Ossoff asked him who won the 2020 presidential election. He refused to answer the question, directly responding, “I’m not gonna engage in this theater.” The Senate subsequently confirmed Clayton.

Fauci has already testified before Congress more than 200 times about such luscious topics as whether the lockdown went on too long, whether the evidence still obviates the theory that the virus leaked from a China lab, and the like. Maybe there is a case for a Pearl Bailey “One More Time,” but he refused to testify, and that is his sacred right.

How long is Paul going to obsess about Fauci? Besides, what angers the Kentuckian are policies that President Donald Trump enacted during his first term and that governors and mayors of both parties pursued. History can judge Fauci, but elevating political disagreements into a trial by inquisition does no one any good.

The much-maligned Senator John Fetterman, the mercurial Pennsylvania Democrat who is on Paul’s committee, used his time at the hearing not to pound the table in defense of Fauci or against him but to publicly muse about whether he pursued good policies as the Commonwealth’s lieutenant governor during the apex of the COVID-19 pandemic. Fetterman wasn’t sure, which demonstrated rare humility. The iconoclast lamented that the debate over the source of the pandemic—wet market versus Chinese lab—was being swayed by politics and not science. It was a welcome moment of modesty on a day dominated by Senator Paul’s Javert- like pursuit of Anthony Fauci.

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