The Ben Shapiro Show - August 06, 2026


The Pardon That Just Backfired on Fauci


Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

215.93

Word count

1,839

Sentence count

139

Harmful content

Misogyny

3

sentences flagged

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Transcript

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Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
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00:00:00.000 We now know exactly what Anthony Fauci lied about to the American people and when he lied about it, and how Fauci was writing in his fluffy pink diary about how awesome he was the whole time and how Julia Roberts loved him and how he was hanging out with Jake Tapper.
00:00:10.000 After pleading the fifth in front of Congress, Anthony Fauci has now officially been held in contempt by Senator Rand Paul and the Republicans.
00:00:16.000 He will be referred to the DOJ for prosecution.
00:00:19.000 We're going to go through what comes next, what's likely to happen next, why it all matters.
00:00:22.000 There was a vote by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
00:00:26.000 They voted on sharp party lines to charge Anthony Fauci with contempt after he pled the fifth.
00:00:31.000 Refusing to answer questions from everyone over fear of self incrimination.
00:00:36.000 Now, that's just the beginning.
00:00:37.000 Doesn't mean he's going to jail.
00:00:38.000 And once a contempt resolution passes by committee, it then heads to the Senate for a full vote.
00:00:43.000 Ron Paul, Rand Paul, rather, Senator Rand Paul, he would like to skip that step altogether and instead just refer this directly to the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia.
00:00:52.000 That makes sense because, of course, if it goes to the full Senate for a vote, it'll get filibustered.
00:00:58.000 That's what Senator Gary Peters of Michigan is accusing Paul of doing.
00:01:03.000 He's suggesting that the goal here would be to stymie this, obviously, by the Democrats.
00:01:09.000 The contempt resolution alleges that Fauci's use of the Fifth Amendment is unsupported because of Joe Biden's pardon, right?
00:01:15.000 Remember, Joe Biden pardoned him for all activities.
00:01:17.000 He's going to claim that he is still eligible for prosecution in the States or that the pardon isn't completely comprehensive.
00:01:24.000 Theoretically, contempt of Congress is punishable with a fine and up to one year in prison.
00:01:29.000 So listen, I think he should go to jail.
00:01:32.000 I think Anthony Fauci lied to Congress multiple times.
00:01:35.000 I do not think that this is some sort of far fetched thing.
00:01:38.000 Steve Bannon went to jail for contempt of Congress.
00:01:40.000 I'm not sure exactly why Anthony Fauci shouldn't go to jail for contempt of Congress.
00:01:44.000 Here are the senators voting to hold Fauci in contempt.
00:01:48.000 Seeing no other motions, the question is on reporting of an original resolution regarding contempt of Congress.
00:01:53.000 The clerk will call the roll.
00:01:54.000 Senator Johnson.
00:01:55.000 Yes.
00:01:56.000 Senator Langford.
00:01:57.000 Aye.
00:01:58.000 Senator Scott.
00:01:58.000 Yes.
00:02:00.000 Senator Hawley.
00:02:00.000 Aye.
00:02:01.000 Senator Moreno.
00:02:02.000 On behalf of the millions of people harmed by Anthony Fauci, resoundingly yes.
00:02:06.000 Senator Ernst?
00:02:07.000 Aye.
00:02:09.000 Senator Moody? Aye.
00:02:10.000 Senator Peters? No.
00:02:12.000 Senator Hassan? No.
00:02:14.000 Senator Blumenthal? No.
00:02:16.000 Senator Fetterman? No.
00:02:19.000 Senator Kim? No. 0.97
00:02:21.000 Senator Gallego?
00:02:22.000 No, by proxy.
00:02:23.000 Senator Slotkin?
00:02:24.000 No, by proxy.
00:02:26.000 Senator Paul? Yes.
00:02:30.000 Mr. Chairman, on the vote of those present, the yeas are eight, the nays are five.
00:02:34.000 Proxy and for the record only, the yeas are zero, the nays are two.
00:02:38.000 On this vote, the yeas are eight, the nays are five, and the motion is agreed to.
00:02:43.000 Okay, so again, what happens now?
00:02:45.000 Again, Rand Paul would like to send this directly to the DOJ for possible prosecution.
00:02:49.000 Even if there's a possible prosecution, you're going to have to get a grand jury to sign off on it.
00:02:53.000 And then, presumably, you'd have to go before a judge who'd also sign off on the prosecution of Fauci.
00:02:57.000 Now, what this really comes down to from a sort of legalistic perspective is whether you can, in fact, invoke the Fifth Amendment to avoid answering any questions once you've already been pardoned.
00:03:05.000 And that is a bit of an open question.
00:03:07.000 Historically speaking, the answer is no.
00:03:09.000 Historically speaking, once you have been pardoned, the Fifth Amendment is designed to protect you from answering questions on the basis that you might be incriminating yourself and then you might go to jail.
00:03:17.000 So, if the threat of jail has been relieved, and this is very frequently done, where you will see in criminal trials, for example, you will see the prosecution essentially waive prosecution in order to compel somebody to testify because you can no longer declare the Fifth.
00:03:33.000 What Fauci is going to claim is that there are still extraneous things that he could say that would get him charged, that again, there are state level things, there are things that are not covered by the pardon.
00:03:42.000 And all of the rest.
00:03:43.000 So we'll have to see how all of this plays out.
00:03:45.000 My guess is that the DOJ will take this up and we'll play that process out.
00:03:49.000 And again, I think that Anthony Fauci was lying to Congress and to the American people on a fairly routine basis, which is terrible.
00:03:57.000 It really is.
00:03:58.000 Because again, he entered when he was first the guy that the Trump administration decided to trot out there.
00:04:04.000 He was highly trusted by the American people.
00:04:06.000 And then he proceeded to say a bunch of things that were not true.
00:04:08.000 And now we have his diaries and we have his cell phone and we know all of the things that he was privately saying and they did not accord with the stuff that he was publicly saying.
00:04:15.000 And when you feed that data to the American public, people will believe it because again, you are in a position of authority.
00:04:23.000 And that is a sin.
00:04:24.000 And you should, in fact, pay a penalty for that, a very significant penalty for all of that.
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00:05:33.000 Now, I will admit, I was late to the anti Fauci train in the sense that, you know, this is a guy who was supposed to know the signs.
00:05:39.000 Donald Trump was standing right next to him.
00:05:41.000 The administration was still touting what he had to say all the way through the end of the first Trump administration.
00:05:47.000 But it also became clear that he really did not have a lot of support for the stuff that he was saying.
00:05:51.000 And that became really clear after about December 2020.
00:05:53.000 So, you know, my approach to COVID throughout the crisis, and you can go back and listen to the show because we were broadcasting every single day, was to follow the available data every single day.
00:06:02.000 So I was very early to the conclusion, for example, that school children should not be barred from school, that schools should not be shut.
00:06:07.000 Because COVID was not affecting kids in the same way that it was affecting, say, elderly adults.
00:06:12.000 I was also very early on the we should not lock down American society bandwagon because it was clear that full lockdowns were not only unnecessary, they were counterproductive.
00:06:21.000 And so I was touting the so called Swedish model, which was tranch out the young, healthy population back into the workforce, let them live normal lives.
00:06:27.000 If they get COVID, they get COVID. 0.52
00:06:28.000 If they spread it around, they get COVID.
00:06:30.000 And now they have a natural immunity.
00:06:31.000 I was touting that very early.
00:06:33.000 I was one of the first people on the show to have on Jay Bhattacharya promoting the Great Barrington Declaration, which was essentially the Swedish plan.
00:06:41.000 I not only opposed mask mandates, I used my company to sue the federal government to stop vax mandates.
00:06:47.000 Okay, so while Tucker Carlson was visiting Mar-a-Lago, telling the president reportedly to shut down the entire country in March, I was not doing any of that sort of stuff.
00:06:56.000 However, what I did do is listen to Fauci when he said things that weren't true.
00:07:01.000 So when Fauci got out there in December of 2020 and he said that the vaccine stopped transmission, I thought, man, if that's the case, this pandemic is over.
00:07:12.000 Because it stops transmission and you're saying it and Pfizer is saying it and it turns out they didn't even test whether it stopped transmission.
00:07:18.000 Now that to me was the really key factor because if it didn't stop transmission, then there was really no reason for kind of young people to get it.
00:07:26.000 Like people my age.
00:07:27.000 I got vaccinated.
00:07:27.000 My wife got vaccinated.
00:07:28.000 The reason that we got vaccinated is because we were afraid that we would pass it on to our parents.
00:07:32.000 My parents were basically bubbled with us at the time.
00:07:35.000 Okay.
00:07:35.000 That was the reason.
00:07:36.000 But we never vaccinated our kids because the data on the kids sucked. 0.82
00:07:40.000 So we never would have done that.
00:07:42.000 So again, Life is complex.
00:07:44.000 Data is complex.
00:07:44.000 Release of data is complex.
00:07:45.000 But the sin that Fauci committed in lying about what he had and the data that was available, the six foot rule that was backed by nothing, all of that, it not only put people who are trying to follow the data on the wrong path,
00:07:59.000 it also totally undermined the entire study of data entirely.
00:08:02.000 And so an enormous amount of the American public went from be skeptical of the experts to trust people who are totally non expert in anything because they have the same credibility and relevance.
00:08:13.000 And that has been a huge problem.
00:08:14.000 This is why I've been saying all along, Democrats should be pissed off at Fauci.
00:08:18.000 Everybody should be pissed off at Fauci because the dude lied.
00:08:21.000 What an amazing video you just watched.
00:08:23.000 Wasn't that amazing?
00:08:24.000 Well, 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.