Dr. Anthony Fauci, who had heretofore never met a microphone from which he wished to social distance, refused to answer the questions of U.S. senators on Wednesday morning.
A cowered Fauci, who spent years ginning up fear in the United States regarding Covid-19, appeared before Congress afraid to answer basic questions.
“You can sit for In Style magazine,” a frustrated Hawley told Fauci, “but you can’t answer questions for the American people.”
The longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) thereby joined mobster Frank Costello, communist Howard Da Silva, and bribed Teapot Dome Interior Secretary Albert B. Fall in invoking the Fifth Amendment rather than answer questions from elected officials.
Questions about whether he shielded work-related communications from public scrutiny by sending and receiving messages on personal devices and accounts or eventually dismissed the theory that he publicly touted of the Wuhan wet-market as the source of Covid yielded the same answer: “On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.”
Even when Senator Josh Hawley (R—Mo.) asked the color of his tie and the day of the week, Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment. Hawley raised the issue of contempt based on the reasoning that his pardon in the last hours of the Biden Administration made the Fifth Amendment moot in this case.
Senator Rand Paul (R—Ky.) ejected criminal defense attorney David Schertler early in the hearing when he attempted to make Fauci’s case as his client simultaneously invoked his right to remain silent. Paul later explained, “In no courtroom in America can you have your witness plead the Fifth Amendment, then your attorney gets to testify.”
Republican senators ranged from the respectful in Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) to the profane in Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio), who used the f-word and the s-word in his questions and statements to Fauci.
Incurious Democrats refused to ask questions in the same rote manner that Fauci refused to answer them. “Dr. Fauci has saved lives,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) declared. Sen. Andy Kim (D.—N.J.) quoted from Theodore Roosevelt’s man-in-the-arena passage and maintained, “The public servants do this work because they love this country.” Others in filibustering their allotted times invoked such boogeymen as Elon Musk, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Joseph McCarthy, and antivaxxers.
The publication of Fauci’s diary, which showed contradictions between his public pronouncements and his private beliefs, necessitated Wednesday’s hearing. Fauci’s claims of fatality rates dramatically higher than influenza in the early days of Covid when he lacked the denominator of cases (and his diary indicated that he knew the falseness of the inflated claims), grants awarded to Chinese doctors who described in published papers conducting gain-of-function research illegal to federally fund under U.S. law, and alleged self-dealing all went unaddressed.
“You can sit for In Style magazine,” a frustrated Hawley told Fauci, “but you can’t answer questions for the American people.”
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