00:00:23.000The real responsibility for Fauci's mistakes ought to lie with a scientific community that is totally unwilling to actually investigate its own flaws.
00:00:30.000So before the hearing, Rand Paul tweeted out, if Anthony Fauci comes before my committee tomorrow and perjures himself, his preemptive pardon from Joe Biden will not protect him.
00:00:40.000So that was him basically arguing that, again, Fauci received a pardon from Joe Biden on his way out that pardoned him for pretty much anything and all he did between 2014 and 2025.
00:00:53.000And so Rand Paul is threatening if you come and you lie in front of Congress, then you could get targeted again.
00:01:00.000Now, of course, back in 2021, Fauci testified before Congress that he had not lied before Congress.
00:01:47.000Okay, so that's what he said back in 2021.
00:01:49.000Well, if you're not lying in front of Congress, you probably shouldn't be all that worried about, you know, a perjury charge.
00:01:55.000But Fauci was very worried about that yesterday.
00:01:57.000That is the reason why he declared the Fifth Amendment, why he invoked the Fifth Amendment against self incrimination, his right against self incrimination.
00:02:04.000He started off with a one minute diatribe about how terrible Rand Paul and mean Rand Paul is.
00:02:11.000Given Senator Paul's obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution, his repeated slanderous comments about me, and recently his publicly releasing my unredacted personal diary aimed at embarrassing and intimidating me,
00:02:34.000the only conclusion I can reach is that the sole reason he is calling me before this committee.
00:02:43.000It is to get me to say something, anything that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, quote, behind bars, unquote.
00:02:58.000Any reasonable person who has followed his unhinged obsession with me would readily come to the same conclusion.
00:03:12.000Okay, so he then proceeded to say that he would invoke the Fifth Amendment.
00:03:17.000We'll get into the legal consequences of that in just one second because the open question is whether he, in fact, could be prosecuted for contempt of Congress.
00:03:25.000Here was Fauci explaining that he would invoke the fifth.
00:03:30.000Although it pains me to do so because of the respect I have for the legislative branch of government and my decades long record of cooperating with Congress under the advice of my attorneys. I will invoke my right under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution to refrain from answering your questions.
00:03:57.000Okay, so then he proceeded to do it again 111 times.
00:03:59.000Well, this did provide a lot of the Republican senators the opportunity to tee off on Fauci and get him to look foolish because when you just keep saying, I invoke the Fifth Amendment, it makes things awkward.
00:04:11.000So he was questioned by Senator Bernie Moreno from Ohio.
00:04:15.000He was asked about whether he would turn around and look at members of the media who had been shamed for telling the truth.
00:04:22.000And that was not a thing he was going to do, obviously.
00:04:26.000Can you do me a favor in the audience and stand up if during the time of the COVID pandemic you were called a racist for calling the virus a Wuhan virus or the China virus?
00:04:39.000If you thought the six foot rule was total crap, if you thought the vaccine wasn't something that you should take, if you thought it was outrageous the way the mass policy was rolled out, if you were fired from your job for not taking that vaccine,
00:04:54.000including members of the military,0.99
00:04:56.000If you thought closing schools was catastrophically stupid, and that you thought that during these times saying these things made you somehow a lesser human being,0.98
00:05:12.000Dr. Frederick, you just turn around and look at the people behind you.0.99
00:05:47.000Okay, so obviously, again, whenever you have a witness who is pleading the fifth and refusing to sort of comply with the rules, that gives you the opportunity to humiliate them.
00:05:56.000And Republicans dunked on them over and over, dunked on Fauci.
00:06:01.000He had some fun with Fauci by asking him basic questions like, What color is your tie?
00:06:05.000Because here's the thing once Fauci starts answering questions, then it makes it harder for him to actually invoke the Fifth Amendment with regard to all other questions.
00:06:12.000That's the reason why he did it in blanket fashion.
00:06:52.000You don't have any rights under the Fifth Amendment because you've been pardoned, as you very well know.
00:06:56.000As the Supreme Court has been clear for a century and more, Brown versus Walker, 1896, when he has been pardoned, he may not stand upon his privilege.
00:08:21.000Because you had moronic politicians that listened to the words of a megalomaniac who was more interested in having met a Kardashian than the suffering of the American people.0.99
00:08:38.000Your advice to communities like that, to idiotic politicians who enforce those rules, arrested that mom for watching a football game with her own family.1.00
00:09:00.000I said to myself, I cannot stand Eileen on the side and watch this happen.
00:09:07.000It was about six years ago today that I decided I'm going to give up my businesses, sell them all, run for office, run for the United States Senate.
00:09:17.000Here I am sitting in front of you six years later saying, Who the f do you think you were for doing that?
00:09:25.000With my friend and colleague Matt Wall, she says, like, you know, listen, it's all fun and games, but is anybody going to get prosecuted for this stuff?
00:09:32.000So, David Limbaugh, lawyer, brother of Rush, he actually went to Westlaw for the sourcing on this.
00:09:40.000And here is what he writes Biden's preemptive pardon in January 2025 should cover any offenses that Fauci may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1st, 2014 through the date of his pardon.
00:09:53.000According to pretty well settled case law, acceptance of a pardon removes the basis for invoking the privilege against self incrimination.
00:10:00.000The Fifth Amendment privilege does not survive for offenses that fall outside the pardon scope.
00:10:05.000The Fifth Amendment has never protected a witness from perjury.
00:10:09.000So it's a bizarre basis to claim that the Fifth Amendment is going to be invoked and you can invoke it to avoid a perjury charge.
00:10:16.000Again, if you could do that, then that would mean that no one would ever have to testify for any reason because you can always be hit with a perjury charge for pretty much anything.
00:10:24.000United States versus Posey, 2023, found that if a witness is questioned about conduct that falls outside a pardon's temporal or subject matter scope, Then the Fifth Amendment privilege remains fully available.
00:10:34.000So theoretically, if they were questioning about something that was outside of the pardon, then he could theoretically invoke the Fifth Amendment, but they weren't.
00:10:41.000They were asking about activities that were covered by the pardon.
00:10:46.000Now, there are other lawyers who are claiming that Fauci could theoretically be hit with a contempt charge.
00:10:50.000Now, what Fauci did here is he showed up in front of the committee.
00:10:53.000That is different than what Steve Bannon did.
00:10:54.000So, Steve Bannon did four months in jail because he was hit with a contempt charge.
00:10:58.000He was hit with a contempt charge because he was subpoenaed by Democrats.
00:11:01.000They wanted him to come and testify and turn over documents related to January 6th.
00:11:27.000Another constitutional attorney said that theoretically the Senate could argue that Fauci has no valid basis to invoke the privilege for the matters that were covered by the pardon.
00:11:37.000And so the committee theoretically has a couple of avenues.
00:11:39.000You could pursue civil litigation to compel his testimony, or you could issue a criminal contempt referral to the DOJ.
00:11:44.000That's the thing that Rand Paul is talking about today.
00:11:47.000Barbara McQuaid, a former U.S. attorney, told Newsweek that Fauci could still face prosecution for any conduct that occurs after the granting of the pardon.
00:11:54.000The Senate could compel testimony from Fauci by granting him immunity.
00:11:59.000There's also the possibility of state level charges.
00:12:02.000I know Florida has been investigating that possibility.
00:12:05.000Now, again, there are a wide variety of pieces of evidence showing that what Fauci was saying publicly, while he was the head of the NIH, Was not comporting with what he was writing privately in his diary.
00:12:18.000So, for example, he was putting heavy pressure on the media not to report the idea that the Wuhan flu started at a lab, not at a wet market.
00:12:25.000And yet, he was writing January 26th, 2020.
00:12:29.000It now appears, using epidata and genomic data, the first infection was in early December and was not connected to the market.
00:12:37.000We know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier.
00:12:41.000On January 31st, again, this is 2020, this is before most of the world knew there was a global pandemic.
00:12:48.000Fauci noted that scientists questioned whether the virus could even have arisen naturally.
00:12:53.000But by May, he was saying publicly that there was no scientific evidence the coronavirus was made in a Chinese lab.
00:13:04.000Fauci told Batya Unger Sargon, when she was over at the Hill, that he didn't recommend locking anything down.
00:13:10.000But we know from his diary that's not true.
00:13:13.000He literally wrote in March of 2020 that he convinced Bill de Blasio and Gavin Newsom to close New York City and California down.
00:13:22.000So, again, all of these would be ripe opportunities for Fauci to answer some questions, especially because he was given a pardon.
00:13:29.000Now, one of the things I have to say here that is kind of astonishing is that if you really are rooting for the science, then science needs to be a self critical, humble process, right?
00:13:38.000You get proved wrong a lot in science, it happens all the time.
00:13:42.000And so, if you have somebody claiming to speak for the science who instead was speaking for his ego, well, wouldn't the scientific establishment have some sort of interest in uncovering that?
00:13:50.000In other words, why is this a political thing?
00:13:52.000This should just be a scientific thing.
00:13:54.000There were other scientists pointing out that he was wrong at the time, ranging from Marty McCarrie to Jay Bhattacharya.
00:13:59.000And Fauci was fighting all of them at the time.1.00
00:14:02.000But the Democrats, because again, the rule in our politics is so stupid.0.99
00:14:05.000If Trump is for something, Democrats are against it.1.00
00:14:07.000If Trump is against something, Democrats are for it.
00:14:09.000Democrats turned Anthony Fauci into some sort of global hero.
00:14:13.000So Democratic Senator Andy Kim yesterday was praising Fauci for being, quote unquote, the man in the arena.
00:14:20.000But these public servants do it because they are in the arena.
00:14:26.000I just want to end by just reading a portion of this because I think it's important as we're thinking about how to be able to treat public servants through this country to think through this.
00:14:38.000And in the words of Teddy Roosevelt saying, it's not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.
00:14:48.000The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly.
00:14:56.000Who errors becomes short again and again, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumphs of hygiene.
00:15:05.000I don't have to listen to this, Gary and Teddy Roosevelt.
00:15:33.000You know what had prevented that relitigation?
00:15:34.000If the scientific community had held Fauci accountable for not reflecting the data, that would have helped.
00:15:38.000That really, really would have helped.
00:15:39.000Because some of us were trying to follow the data at a granular level, which meant that our opinions would change as the data changed.
00:15:45.000And if it turns out that you were lying about the data, like, for example, that the vaccine was going to end transmissibility, which is a thing that was said over and over and over while Fauci was working in the Trump administration at the end of 2020, beginning of 2021, if it turns out that's falsified, well,
00:16:03.000But for the left, anyone who is disliked by the right must necessarily be good, which presumably is why James Tallarico, back in 2021, was buying Fauci action figures for Christmas and celebrating them.
00:16:14.000Is now the Senate Democrat candidate in Texas.
00:16:17.000Quote, I got the coolest action figure for Christmas.
00:16:19.000Thank you to all the healthcare superheroes working today.
00:16:21.000Let's help by getting vaxxed and boosted.
00:16:33.000know, whether there are any consequences or not, it seems to me that if there are going to be consequences for this thing in the future, it shouldn't just lie with Anthony Fauci.
00:16:39.000It should lie with the entire system that refused to examine what Anthony Fauci was saying.0.66
00:16:46.000It should also lie with China, which spread the virus.
00:16:48.000And it should lie, by the way, with members of the government in both parties who decided to leave this guy in a position of power.0.79
00:16:55.000Now, President Trump does take a hit for this.
00:16:57.000Now, President Trump left Anthony Fauci in that position while publicly ripping on him.
00:17:05.000He recalled his relationship with Fauci on Truth Social yesterday.
00:17:23.000Also, I said from the beginning, the virus came from the Wuhan laboratory in China.
00:17:26.000Fauci strongly disagreed, always trying to protect China.0.74
00:17:28.000I inherited Fauci, who was there since the eighties, but with each passing day, relied less and less on them.0.98
00:17:32.000He made too many bad calls like unmasks.
00:17:34.000Remember at the beginning, he was an anti-masker, and then he switched to a super-masker.
00:17:37.000In any event, I didn't let him shut the country down, although he wanted to.
00:17:40.000I went the federalist way and let the governors decide.
00:17:43.000The Republican governors did a much better job than the Democrats.
00:17:45.000Fauci was largely taken out of play, and then along came sleepy Joe Biden, who made Fauci a king.
00:17:50.000Again, it's a bit of a rewriting of history.
00:17:51.000Fauci remained in charge of the system largely during Trump's administration.
00:17:56.000Trump certainly handled it better than Biden, who continued to maintain the lockdown protocols and the vaccine rituals for children and the masking nonsense for full on a year after the pandemic had essentially mitigated.
00:18:12.000But bottom line is this if we want better policy for the future, then some self critical investigation would be a good thing.
00:18:20.000Not just, you know, berating Fauci or defending Fauci full scale.
00:18:23.000What an amazing video you just watched.
00:18:26.000Well, you know, if you think so, head on over to dailywire.comslash subscribe to watch the full show ad free or check out this crazy story here.