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July 29, 2026
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Rand Paul Orders Fauci’s Lawyer Removed As Hearing Grows Chaotic – PJ Media

They don’t know what they’re clicking, no, they’ve no way of knowing what the tab is …





Ed: Oh, I don’t think anyone wonders much at all about the reason for the pardon. It’s the elites protecting the elites from the consequences of their corruption. However, Biden used the same 10-year frame for Hunter Biden’s pardon, too. It probably comes from the same problem – no one really knows how many crimes they committed. 

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Mediaite: [Jonathan] Turley, an attorney and legal analyst, argued Paul framed his final questions well because he asked Fauci about a period before he was pardoned.

He said:

Well, Harris, this is a bit of a murky question with regard to the impact of a presidential pardon. His attorneys are probably on good ground that the courts are likely to adopt an expansive view of the pardon in terms of its protection but also allow him to avoid any further culpability by invoking the privilege, that the pardon would not extinguish that ability.

But really the tough moment for him came at the end when Senator Paul crafted a question that said, I’m asking you this question within the limits of the period of your pardon. That was a very important framing because he is saying, I’m not asking you to say anything after the pardon where he could obviously claim privilege. I’m talking about the period before which you were pardoned.

CNN legal analyst Elie Honig also weighed in over on his network about Fauci invoking the Fifth Amendment, saying he’s “probably within his rights.”

Turley added that Paul’s final question “will present this in the clearest way to the court. Now it was also raised whether he might have waived his privilege because he made a long statement, a relatively long statement before the invocation. That’s also a type of murky area.”

Ed: I wondered about the opening statement, too. Even apart from the issue of the pardon, offering any kind of testimony at all usually complicates attempts to use the Fifth Amendment as a shield later. One other complication: Fauci’s pardon only covers federal prosecution. He could argue that he’s still at risk of criminal charges at the state level …





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Ed: This goes to my previous point. However, under normal circumstances, a federal official facing this kind of prosecution for acts committed as part of that office would file a motion to move jurisdiction to a federal court. And Fauci’s pardon would cover that if the court followed normal precedent. 

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Stephen Mosher at the NY Post: Fauci’s “original pandemic sin,” of course, was funding Chinese labs. The long-time head of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Disease was the chief cheerleader and funder of “gain of function” research — the dangerous idea that deadly viruses could be created and studied in the lab to help prevent the next pandemic.

Had the head of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Dr. Shi Zhengli, not been taught these techniques in Fauci-funded labs, she wouldn’t have been able to create coronaviruses in her lab. And the world might have been spared the COVID pandemic.

Whether Fauci inadvertently helped to create COVID or not, once it had emerged from the Wuhan, he made a bad situation much, much worse.

The truth is, Fauci couldn’t have caused any more unnecessary suffering and death in America if he had tried to.

No wonder he doesn’t want to answer any questions.

Ed: Everything starts with Fauci’s attempts to hide the fact that COVID-19 came from gain-of-function research that he pushed, in a country and a lab with substandard protocols, using funding he directed. And it doesn’t help that Fauci is apparently a complete incompetent at his job, a fact he tried to hide by making himself into Mr. Science. He’s easily one of the most despicable figures to emerge from the DC swamp, where he’s been marinating for decades.  

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Ed: Why not? They took the Fifth all through Joe Biden’s supposed presidency. They refused to testify to his incompetency and Biden Inc corruption. The media perjured themselves with Sharp as a Tack™ narratives and attempted to DARVO critics by accusing them of using “cheap fakes” and being “ageist.” They then pretended to discover Biden’s infirmity in the days after the June 2024 debate, and even tried packaging it up in Now It Can Be Told fictional histories. The Protection Racket Media will give itself a pass no matter what label they will slap onto it. 

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Scott Pinsker at PJ Media: He’ll almost certainly avoid criminal charges. (The wording of President Joe Biden’s pardon shields him from “any offenses against the United States” that were “arising from or in any manner related” to his tenure as Chief Medical Advisor to the President, a member of the White House COVID-19 Response Team, the White House Coronavirus Task Force, or as Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.)

Plus, he’s already 85 years old. Fauci won’t spend a single day behind bars. (Presidential pardons are a helluva lot more effective than the COVID vaccine.)

But he won’t escape punishment in the court of public opinion.

Dr. Fauci’s punishment won’t be criminal. Yet for a man with his (considerable) ego, he’s about to suffer a fate that’s far worse:

Anthony Fauci will be remembered as the man who broke America’s trust in science.

The trouble with science is that it relies on scientists. And scientists, alas, are simply people.

Ed: Scott’s wrong about one thing – science doesn’t solely rely on scientists. It also relies on observers who use common sense to question claims made by scientists, forcing them to prove their hypotheses and theories. The problem in the COVID-19 pandemic was not so much the scientists, but the observers whose job it was to challenge their assumptions, especially when other scientists spoke up, like Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and the other signatories to the Great Barrington Declaration. Instead, these observers – the media, Academia, and the government – rushed to censor and silence those who raised those questions. That’s not science at all. It’s a cult, and Fauci was its preeminent idol. 





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Ed: Johnson is being deliberately provocative. Fauci didn’t lie to his diary, but he lied to the public and the media. Part of that was to protect his GOF research track record, but just as much of it was to promote his own cult of personality. 

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Jim Geraghty at NRO: Again, Wu largely attempts to defend Fauci against the accusations that the U.S. government knowingly funded dangerous gain-of-function research in China, or that he was the architect of the lockdowns:

When Fauci said that sending kids back to school without a vaccine could be risky, and that opening schools in areas experiencing intense viral transmission would not be prudent, many people took that to mean Fauci said to keep all kids home, indefinitely. (School closures were ultimately up to individual states and districts, and decisions about them were complicated by demands from teachers’ unions.)

Eh, in his personal writings, Fauci mentions talking with then–New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and Ann O’Leary, the chief of staff for California Governor Gavin Newsom, about closing schools, right before they announced decisions to close the schools. No, Fauci didn’t give the order to close the schools, he just advised a bunch of the people who gave the order to close the schools. And if Fauci had any misgivings about keeping schools closed for a year (much longer in some communities), he kept them to himself. …

If you’re a Fauci fan, you probably figured there had to be some reasonable explanations as to why his assessments written in his diary seemed so different from his statements to the public during the pandemic. Today, Fauci didn’t give them to you.





Ed: And so the reasonable conclusion is that there are no reasonable explanations to give … other than he lied and covered up. I’m not so sure that Jim’s correct that Democrats have begun to back away from Saint Fauci, at least not yet, but perhaps they’re ready to stop defending him so vigorously.

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Ed: Or not. Ugh. 

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John Fund at The Spectator: In his final hours in office, President Joe Biden issued a preemptive, blanket legal pardon for Dr. Anthony Fauci, the most visible US health official during the Covid pandemic, for any and all actions he took from 2014 on, the same kind of pardon he granted his son Hunter Biden. Fauci, like Hunter Biden, thus literally rose above the law.

That’s what made today’s decision by Fauci to take the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination at a hearing of the Senate Homeland Security Committee so shocking. …

But the story is much bigger than that. Fauci was appearing under subpoena to address grave questions of government accountability during the pandemic. In April, a federal grand jury indicted Fauci’s former senior advisor, David Morens, on felony charges for allegedly circumventing public records laws to conceal internal Covid emails.

As proof that Morens may have had something to hide, over the weekend Paul released a trove of pandemic-era diary entries by Fauci that document his thoughts as he dealt with the crisis and marinated in his new celebrity status as “America’s Doctor.”

Ed: Hmmmm. Perhaps Fauci’s willing to risk a contempt charge to protect his former aide. Or perhaps Fauci’s former aide may have to say about Fauci’s actions. This is worth watching, and it’s a good catch by John Fund. 





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Ed: I would have paid cash money to shut Fauci up. 

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Daily Caller: “There was a mom in Ohio during the depth of the coronavirus pandemic who decided to go to the football game for her son,” Moreno said, referring to the story of a mother who was tased and arrested for not wearing a mask.

The mother was also charged with criminal trespass, resisting arrest and obstructing official business after not following what Moreno described as the “stupid” mask policy, despite the mother and her family being outside and distanced from those she was not living with.

“Those policies were put in place because you had moronic politicians who listened to the words of a megalomaniac who was more interested in having met a Kardashian than the suffering of the American people, and that is you,” Moreno said. “Your advice to communities like that, to idiotic politicians who enforced those rules, arrested that mom for watching a football game with her family outside.”

Moreno said hearing this story on the news motivated him to run for the Senate.

“Here I am, sitting in front of you six years later saying, who the f*ck do you think you were for doing that?” the senator said, adding that it was a “total disgrace” what Fauci did to the country.

Ed: I’m not a fan of using foul language in Congress. I understand and support the sentiment, but we have better words in forums such as these. However, Moreno is telling just one story among millions about the cruelties imposed on Americans, thanks to idiotic conclusions reached by Fauci. Remember the surfer that got arrested on a California beach?

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Ed: Let’s hope not. 

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✅ The policies Fauci advocated played a key role in creating the partisan divide.

✅ Despite his efforts to censor and silence anybody who said a lab leak likely caused the pandemic, most voters consistently believed the lab leak theory was true.

Ed: At least the Era of St. Fauci has ended. 

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Last night’s lyric: “I’ve Seen All Good People” by Yes. (And tonight’s is a bit of an inside joke.)


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