TMZ founder Harvey Levin used his outlet’s platform this week to defend Dr. Anthony Fauci, describing the retired immunologist’s contentious Senate testimony as one of the most painful moments he has witnessed in government and comparing the pursuit of Fauci to McCarthy-era tactics, according to Mediaite.
Mr. Levin said watching Dr. Fauci take the Fifth Amendment before Congress “is just one of the most heartbreaking things I have seen in government in my lifetime,” while acknowledging he has “problems with how the CDC handled COVID.” He went on to credit Dr. Fauci’s decades of public service, recalling friends who died of AIDS in the 1980s and others who survived because Dr. Fauci was willing to explore experimental treatments.
“Now, we are at a point where members of Congress and yes, you, Rand Paul, are on a witch hunt,” Mr. Levin continued. “The best I can say for Rand Paul is that he’s being really honest. He has said now, over a period of years, he wants Anthony Fauci in a jail cell … that’s the point of this hearing. That’s why they’re doing this.”
The comments came after Dr. Fauci, 85, repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment rights Wednesday before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which Mr. Paul chairs, declining to answer questions about his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The sole reason he is calling me before this committee is to prompt me to say something, anything, that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, ’behind bars,’” Dr. Fauci said in his opening statement.
Ahead of the hearing, Mr. Paul’s committee released more than 1,100 pages of pandemic-era diary entries Dr. Fauci wrote between 2019 and 2022. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said the records were retrieved from 11 government computer servers after an eight-month search and turned over to the committee, according to ABC7 New York.
Mr. Paul has argued the entries show Dr. Fauci privately doubted the natural-origin theory of the coronavirus even as he publicly dismissed a lab-leak explanation, calling the gap a sign of dishonesty. But Dr. Fauci has consistently maintained that natural spillover was the more likely explanation while acknowledging that no theory has been definitively proven, and reporting on the diary notes that at least one contested entry — in which he called a Wuhan market an “amplifier” rather than the source of the outbreak — tracks with what he said publicly at the time.
At the close of the roughly three-hour hearing, Mr. Paul announced the committee would vote next week on whether to hold Dr. Fauci in contempt of Congress for refusing to answer questions.
“I really did want to hear from Dr. Fauci,” Mr. Paul said. “I wanted to hear perhaps an apology, perhaps some semblance of being sorry for what happened.” Mr. Paul has argued that Dr. Fauci’s Fifth Amendment claim is undermined both by his 2025 pardon from President Joe Biden and by his decision to deliver an opening statement, according to PBS News.
President Trump also weighed in Wednesday, telling reporters he had never been a strong supporter of Dr. Fauci and that he disagreed with him often during his first term.
“Why he did that was very simple: His lawyer told him to. I don’t know if he would have been better off not doing it,” Mr. Trump said.
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