Hello, and welcome, my friends, to Thursday, July 30, 2026. One day further from the wing sauce, one day closer to the weekend.
My calendar says it’s Cheesecake Day, Chili Dog Day, Father-in-Law Day, Intern Day, Day of Friendship, Whistleblower Day, Paperback Book Day, Share a Hug Day, Mutt Day, and Avocado Day. So bake a cheesecake, hug a mutt, mail your father-in-law a paperback, and thank an intern before thanking a whistleblower—just try to keep the chili dog away from all four of ’em.
Today In History:
1619: The House of Burgesses convenes in Jamestown, Va., forming the first elected legislative assembly in the New World.
1729: Settlers found the city of Baltimore.
1777: George Clinton takes office as the first elected governor of New York.
1792: Troops from Marseille sing “La Marseillaise” publicly in Paris for the first time.
1844: Sailors found the New York Yacht Club aboard John Cox Stevens’ yacht Gimcrack.
1864: Union forces detonate a mine beneath Confederate lines at Petersburg, but the ensuing assault fails.
1928: George Eastman demonstrates the first amateur color motion pictures, Kodacolor, for guests including Thomas Edison.
1932: The Summer Olympics open in Los Angeles.
1942: President Franklin Roosevelt signs the law creating the WAVES, the Navy’s women’s reserve.
1945: A Japanese submarine torpedoes the USS Indianapolis days after she delivers components for the atomic bomb, and fewer than a third of her crew survive.
1956: President Dwight Eisenhower signs the law making “In God We Trust” the official motto.
1965: President Lyndon Johnson signs Medicare into law.
1975: Teamsters leader Jimmy Hoffa vanishes in suburban Detroit.
1980: The Knesset passes a law reaffirming Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
Birthdays today include: Henry Ford, Ford Motor Company founder; Paul Anka, singer (“Diana,” “Put Your Head on My Shoulder”); Jimmy Cliff, reggae musician (“Many Rivers to Cross,” “The Harder They Come”); Kate Bush, singer-songwriter (“Running Up That Hill”, “Wuthering Heights”); Arnold Schwarzenegger, actor and former California governor (Terminator, Predator); Jean Reno, actor (Léon: The Professional, The Da Vinci Code); Laurence Fishburne, actor (The Matrix trilogy, Boyz n the Hood, John Wick); Lisa Kudrow, actress (Friends); Delta Burke, actress (Designing Women); Alton Brown, chef (Good Eats); Terry Crews, actor and former NFL player (Everybody Hates Chris, White Chicks); Richard Linklater, film director (Boyhood, Dazed and Confused); Peter Bogdanovich, film director (The Last Picture Show); Buddy Guy, blues musician (“Damn Right, I’ve Got the Blues”).
If today’s your birthday too, happy day—just go easy on the cheesecake and the chili dog both, OK?
* * *
What’s next for the guy who managed to make Josef Mengele and Jack Kevorkian both look like amateurs by comparison, Anthony Fauci?
There are several possibilities here, and I’ll try to cover all the ones I can foresee. I warn you that like many of my deep analytical dives, this is going to get a little messy. So, stay with me here. Understand that I make no claims to actually covering all possibilities, of course, but here’s how I see things at the moment.
Sen. Rand Paul has scheduled a committee vote for August 5, on whether to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress for refusing to answer a single question. Fauci invoked the Fifth more than 100 times during the hearing—some reports say 111, which is either a constitutional strategy or a new Olympic event—and the vote will almost certainly break down along party lines, since several Democrats on the panel rushed to Fauci’s defense mid-hearing. Clearly, they’re not interested in the truth of the matter.
Several GOP members, Sen. Josh Hawley chief among them, argue Fauci has no valid Fifth Amendment claim in the first place, since Biden’s pardon already grants him immunity from criminal prosecution. The idea being, you can’t incriminate yourself with testimony if there’s no crime left to charge you with. Our own Matt Margolis caught the moment yesterday, quoting Hawley directly:
“Let’s just get one thing straight, you don’t have any rights under the Fifth Amendment because you’ve been pardoned,” Hawley said. “As you very well know, as the Supreme Court has been clear for a century and more, Brown v. Walker, 1896. When he has been pardoned, he may not stand upon his privilege.”
Paul himself called this legal theory “untested,” saying it would likely have to be decided by a court. Far be it from me to correct Sen. Paul, but I doubt that very much. The test happened already—in 1896, in fact—under the name Brown v. Walker, 161 U.S. 591. I’m interested that Paul didn’t know that, and also that Hawley hadn’t mentioned it to him.
Here’s the short version of the Walker case review, for anyone who skipped that week of law school. Walker, a railroad officer, got subpoenaed to testify before the Interstate Commerce Commission about rate-fixing collusion. He refused to answer, invoking the Fifth, even though a federal immunity statute already promised nothing he said could be used against him. Walker’s position was that statutory immunity wasn’t good enough—that only a pardon, or the total impossibility of prosecution, could strip him of the right to stay silent. He got held in contempt, and the case climbed to the Supreme Court.
The question the court had to settle: does the Fifth Amendment protect against self-incrimination itself—any admission that makes you look bad—or only against testimony that could actually convict you of something?
By a 5-4 vote, the Court sided with the government. Justice Henry Billings Brown, writing for the majority, held that the privilege tracks the risk of prosecution, not the risk of embarrassment. Once that prosecution risk disappears entirely—by statutory immunity, or by pardon—the constitutional basis for silence disappears with it. A pardoned witness, Brown wrote, “stands, with respect to such offense, as if it had never been committed.” He didn’t pull that out of thin air, either—he grounded it in English common law and the Aaron Burr treason trial, so the “untested” label doesn’t even survive contact with the 19th century, let alone the 21st.
The logic holds up fine today: the Fifth protects against testimony that could convict you. Erase the possibility of conviction, and there’s nothing left for the privilege to attach to.
A later case, Burdick v. United States, 236 U.S. 79, brushes up against this, though I doubt it changes the outcome here. Burdick was a journalist Woodrow Wilson tried to pardon specifically to force him to testify. Burdick refused the pardon outright and got held in contempt anyway for pleading the Fifth. The Court sided with him, ruling unanimously that a witness can still refuse to testify if he declines the pardon offered to him. Crucially, that doesn’t help Fauci—everyone knows he’s already accepted his. And we also know he was campaigning for it to be granted.
Fauci’s team is left arguing the pardon only covers conduct through the date it was signed, so any new admission could expose him to fresh charges. That’s a shaky proposition at best, resting on three narrow legs:
First, anything Fauci says today that amounts to a new offense—perjury, false statements to Congress—isn’t covered by a pardon issued before he said it, and it revives full Fifth Amendment protection for those specific answers.
Second, a presidential pardon covers federal offenses only; it does nothing to block state prosecution under the dual-sovereignty doctrine, and I’m already seeing chatter that a few state AGs are circling this exact opening. Our Catherine Salgado touched on this.
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier evidently was keeping an eye on the proceedings, because after the hearing on Wednesday, he posted on X, Fauci’s lack of candor to Congress is unbelievable. My office is launching an investigation into Dr. Fauci. It’s past time we get the truth of what happened during COVID.
Third, the pardon addresses criminal exposure and nothing else—it says nothing about civil suits, and sworn testimony today becomes fair game as an admission in any civil case where Fauci’s a party or witness. That last one may be the real engine behind the blanket silence, whatever the pardon technically covers.
Bottom line: Hawley and Paul had the stronger textbook argument in the room. For conduct squarely inside the pardon’s window, Fauci’s blanket Fifth Amendment invocation doesn’t rest on solid ground—not against better than 130 years of precedent, anyway.
Brown v. Walker isn’t some dusty footnote, either. It’s the foundation under the entire modern practice of compelling testimony through immunity—Congress and prosecutors lean on it constantly. It’s also exactly what Hawley and Paul cited against Fauci: since the Fifth tracks prosecution risk rather than hurt feelings, and Fauci’s federal prosecution risk for pardoned conduct is gone, his blanket refusal doesn’t hold up for that category of questions—caveats for state exposure, civil liability, and post-pardon conduct duly noted above.
Our Tim O’Brien flags something else worth chewing on, from Just the News’ John Solomon. Matt Margolis caught this one too, from an interview with Bill O’Reilly:
“We know that in the end days of Joe Biden, Anthony Fauci got a pardon,” Solomon said. “He can’t be prosecuted for anything before January 20, 2025. But if Rand Paul puts him on the stand next week, as he’s going to compel him to do, and Anthony Fauci does not tell the truth this time in the body of evidence that’s there, he could be instantly prosecuted by the Trump Justice Department. If he does tell the truth, he’s going to have to admit he lied to us previously.”
So either way, Fauci’s boxed in—state exposure on one side, a fresh DOJ prosecution on the other, or at minimum a contempt citation his legal team probably considers the least-bad option on the table.
Tim raises one more wrinkle worth sitting with: the validity of the autopen behind the pardon itself. The Biden administration signed off on a fairly generous list of ethically sketchy pardons using that device, and if you had to hand-pick one to put autopen validity to the legal test, Fauci is as close to the ideal test case as I think we’ll ever find. Catherine Herridge laid out the mechanism on X: (Tim notes the post, but strangely it’s been taken off X.)
One strategy calls for charging Fauci with a crime, with the expectation he would file a motion with the court to dismiss based on the pardon. This could open the door to challenging the sweeping pardon’s viability and years of litigation.
Which would be a fascinating fight, except for two small problems: we have no documented proof Biden actually signed off on that pardon personally, and litigation over pardon validity has a way of outlasting everyone involved, defendant included, particularly when said defendant is 85 years old.
There’s a lot of directions this thing can take, but there’s one thing certain: There is no doubt at all this thing is not over, assuming the Democrats don’t manage to take the Senate. Which is, oops, another outcome.
Finally, I have one point that has international implications: If Fauci is not prosecuted, the question becomes why anyone in the world, any country, any jurisdiction should ever believe that America has their best interests at heart.
Literally millions of people in literally every country in the world except possibly Antarctica died and/or had their lives ripped up, businesses gone, relatives gone, and so on, all because of the virus this man illegally created with United States Money. They suffered while he basked in his own stardom.
Can anyone blame any country in the world for not trusting us going forward, absent serious consequences to Fauci? Such a lack can and likely will be taken as our government fully supporting his actions and hiding him from the consequences of all the deaths he caused around the world.
Thought for the Day: Whistleblowers tell the truth under oath and pay for it. Everyone else, apparently, just pleads the Fifth.
VIP members: Let’s hear your thoughts. What do YOU think is next?
Take care today. With a little luck, we can do this again tomorrow. See you then.
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