Screw the Pardon! What Penalty Would Fit Fauci?

Turns out, the officious little twerp kept a personal diary of his performances and accolades during those days as the highly-paid director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. 

Dear Diary, he told himself in one entry: “It is not hyperbole to say that today I am the most famous and talked about person in the country and one of the most recognizable” in the world. Even Barbra Streisand, the angry singer, called him for vaccine advice, and she expressed appreciation over his fondness for her songs. I bet his favorite wasn't this one. 

Then, there was the time that Fauci, the son of a Brooklyn pharmacist, was awed to be in the presence of actress Julia Roberts for unexplained reasons at a celebrity awards ceremony: 

She is so charming, natural, fun, and amazingly beautiful. When my image came up on the screen, she gasped and said that every time she sees me her throat gets dry and she gets nervous.

He should have had his people call her people so they could take lunch. 

Unfortunately for Tony Fauci, Tony Fauci wrote his 1,100-page diary on government servers. That means that even after he retired in 2022, after downloading his diary for a lucrative memoir, the revealing notes documenting his less-than-forthright statements and colossal hypocrisies remained on file.

And wouldn’t you know in that D.C. Swamp, people who did not like the political prancer were able to reassemble the doctor’s self-inflating, self-incriminating notes scattered throughout 11 different federal servers and share them with someone else who does not like Fauci. That was Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Health Secretary.

(In Sicilian, the name Fauci means “sickle” or someone who makes or uses sickles. Here, I could insert a pandemic metaphor about what sickles are used for, but I won’t.)

Another disliker of Fauci is Kentucky’s GOP Sen. Rand Paul, a fellow doctor who’s had it in for Fauci since those scary COVID days when Fauci acted like he knew everything and scolded those who failed to bow. 

Paul released the diary a week ago like the opening barrage from a battleship’s 16-inch guns on a beachhead in advance of a Marine landing. 

The “landing” came last Wednesday when Fauci appeared before Paul’s Senate Homeland Security Committee to refuse to answer any questions, including the color of his tie. 

Fauci cited his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination 111 times, although he did voice a lengthy statement about Paul being “unhinged.” 

The trouble with that legal strategy is that just before being assisted out of the White House in 2025, Joe Biden or his auto-pen granted Fauci a preemptive, full, and unconditional pardon from 2014 to January 2025.

That protects him only from all potential federal criminal charges related to his COVID-19 pandemic response, government-funded scientific research, and his public service. (But states could still take their own legal action.)

It's almost as if they knew something else likely was coming.

In theory then, Fauci should be free of legal jeopardy and required to answer congressional questions about that subject. His refusal suggests one of two things, or both: 

1. He’s covering for somebody, fears questioning could go there, and not be covered by the pardon, or 
2. He fears being caught lying to a congressional committee as he did so routinely to the public, which would be a new, unpardoned offense.

Interestingly, mainstream media in Washington also seem to be taking the Fifth on in-depth coverage of Fauci’s faults as revealed in his own diary. 

That’s because to thoroughly cover all his lies and hypocrisies now would also reveal their enthusiastic complicity and incriminate their unquestioning, cheer-leading coverage of Fauci during COVID. And their enthusiastic enforcement against any dangerous skeptics of his edicts on vaccines, masks, and widespread closures.

The COVID experience was a fast-evolving crisis with many unknowns. Fauci et al. could have acknowledged that. They could have confessed they had no certain answers; they were trying everything; please be patient.

But no. Washington culture is so full of itself it could never admit not knowing anything. Instead, they imposed extreme, experimental precautions with certainty, advocating and imposing draconian responses on any who professed doubts about what were, in reality, merely scientific guesses. 

Mob media went along without questioning, exactly as they did when Democrats claimed President Joe Biden was “sharp as a tack” or Hunter's laptop was Russian disinformation.

Do you too see a one-way street here?

The Founding Fathers gave media constitutional protections to be government watchdogs, not partisan lapdogs.

Now, I’m no science expert. You could ask my high school biology teacher about that. Except I didn’t have one. And although I have often stayed at Holiday Inn Express, I am no lawyer either.

But after nearly six decades covering news, I do know a little about politics, government, and American thinking. Public officials get away with a lot of things. More on that later.

However, something that really sticks in the craw of most Americans is hypocrisy and lying. 

In 2016, Donald Trump got elected commander in chief, his very first public office, running against the chronic lies and hypocrisies of both parties’ D.C. Establishments. 

They promise all kinds of stuff, and then, once they get on that trusty federal payroll with its sweet perqs that endure even after retirement, the campaign promises slip their minds. We’re already being served large scoops of new ones in advance of November’s midterms.

But one by one, this Trump person kept his campaign promises – the tax cuts, the conservative judges and justices, rebuilding the military, defending right-to-life, energy independence, etc.

Besides the stink of Fauci’s diary pride and preening to himself, the 85-year-old Fauci deserves a lifetime sentence without parole just for hypocrisy: Remember the importance of social distancing, the certain immunity of the experimental vaccine, the mask mandates, shelter in place, two weeks to flatten the curve, his COVID origin obfuscations?

The thousands of service members and others fired for refusing the unproven vaccine, the shunning of vaccine skeptics, exaggerated death tolls, the learning deficits of millions from shuttered schools, the failed businesses and lost jobs, the loved ones forced to die without the touch of family, and the survivors' memories of that and the prohibited funerals. 

Then, there's Fauci’s secret financing of gain-of-function research in China. In Communist China! With the world’s largest military and global ambitions to match! 

Who outside of a Tom Clancy novel would help finance his own country's most menacing strategic adversary as it plays around with the DNA of a deadly virus? In a lab just down the street from the perfect spawning ground of a major seafood/wildlife market?

Joe Biden, the guy who let that giant Chinese spy balloon complete its week-long, low-level surveillance of major U.S. military bases across the country, pardoned all of that and more, including his alcoholic, drug-addicted, lying, influence-peddling, deadbeat-dad son. 

The old guy or his caretakers are getting paid $10 million for someone else to write the detailed “personal” memoir of a man with the memory of a toddler, a dumb one. 

The publication date has been delayed to later in November because Democrats don’t want midterm voters reminded of the truth: that crowd’s senility, subterfuges, and shell companies taking in suspicious financial transfers from China.

What a pack of miscreant elder abusers they are. And you know they'll skate.

So, what will come out of all these damning diary details, the explosive hearings, the likely contempt of Congress charge, the needless deaths and costs, the outrage and bitter memories, and the CYA op-eds to come?

Nothing. Absolutely nothing. 

Paul says his committee will consider contempt of Congress charges against Fauci this week. Maybe he'll even write a strongly-worded letter. Ohh, scary stuff. Political theater.

Remember what happened when Eric Holder, Obama’s attorney general, was charged with contempt of Congress for refusing to answer questions about actually giving weapons to Mexican drug cartels? Weapons that ended up killing people, including a Border Patrol agent. 

America's chief law-enforcement officer dealing weapons to drug dealers and refusing to answer congressional questions.

Nothing happened. Zero. Holder’s campaigning now to kill the Electoral College to give blue states an easier route to the White House so they can pull off more of this stuff.

Remember when four Americans, including the ambassador to Libya, were killed by terrorists in Benghazi with no backup or rescue attempt and Barack Obama, the commander in chief, was absent for 16 hours with no explanation?

And an official Accountability Review Board led by Obama's top military advisor, retired Adm. Mike Mullen, could find no one at fault? Maybe because he never even interviewed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. 

And the Republican Rep. Trey Gowdy led weeks of explosive Oversight hearings into the lack of security and Democrat Clinton’s responsibility for no preparations or rescue?

Remember what happened after that? Nothing.

Or even the time a president took oral sex from a female subordinate in the Oval Office? 

There are NO CONSEQUENCES in Washington, for Dems anyway.

No wonder trust in major institutions has cratered. Disapproval of Congress now stands at 86 percent; its job approval has sunk to 10 percent, just one point above the worst ever.

Only 15 percent of Americans say they trust government to do what’s right “most of the time.” 

The confidence of America’s population in 14 major institutions averages 27 percent, just one point above the all-time low. Gee, I wonder why.

But Dr. Anthony Stephen Fauci is confident he’ll do just fine. At retirement, his annual salary was the highest in the federal government, $480,654. His estimated annual pension works out to about 86 percent of that, $414,000.

Every president of the United States is required by law to be paid. The official salary is $400,000 per year, well under Fauci’s. However, the current president takes only one dollar, as required; the remaining $399,999 Trump is donating toward White House preservation and renovations.

You may have missed media’s coverage of that charitable act.