That’s the problem with the Fifth Amendment: It tends to make you look guilty.
So I cringed a little the first two or three times Dr. Anthony Fauci invoked his constitutional protection against self-incrimination when he appeared last month before the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.
But as he continued to rely on the Fifth — eventually more than a hundred times over a brutal three-hour grilling — I began to come around. Who are these Republicans who seem so hellbent on entrapping Fauci for inconsistencies or misstatements that he might have committed during dozens of interviews, news conferences, congressional hearings and diary entries?
Ask any of them who actually won the 2020 election — not who served as president from 2021 through 2024 — and they will refuse to answer. It’s President Donald Trump’s version of the Fifth Amendment: No Republican who hopes to remain in good standing can honestly answer that question.
In fact, any courageous Republican who dares to answer straightforwardly will be incriminated big-time with Trump.
And why are they looking at Fauci’s personal diary? True, he made the mistake of writing the diary on a government computer, but that’s a weak pretext upon which to dishonor one of the most basic rights of Americans: the right to privacy.
There’s something deeply hypocritical about exposing a diary that Fauci clearly intended to be private, while tolerating the concealment of the Epstein files, which were, by law, supposed to have been fully released by December of 2025.
I’ll concede that I haven’t read the entire Fauci diary; it’s more than 1,100 pages. Some news sources that have reviewed the diary say that it contains inconsistencies between some of Fauci’s public statements during the pandemic and the private diary entries.
Other sources say that the alleged discrepancies are overblown and that they reflect the uncertainty and confusion that naturally occurs when confronting a mysterious new virus.
Since I haven’t read the full diary myself, I decline to take a position. Frankly, I wouldn’t mind hearing answers to some of the questions that have been raised. But a confrontational Senate hearing mounted by Republicans who have publicly expressed a desire to prosecute Fauci — Sen. Rand Paul has said that he wants Fauci behind bars — is not the right forum in which to hold Fauci to account.
Furthermore, these same Republicans have shown no interest in holding to account the leader ultimately responsible for our nation’s pandemic response, Trump. In January of 2020, Trump assured the nation that the pandemic was “totally under control.” In February he said that it was “going to disappear … like a miracle.” Also in February, he said, “When it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away.”
But in March Trump was recorded telling journalist Bob Woodward: “I always wanted to play it down. I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”
Are there any Republicans who would care to hold Trump to account for discrepancies between what he said about the pandemic in public and in private?
I doubt it. But Fauci is a target they’re not afraid of.
Fauci may have made mistakes. But a lot of the criticism leveled at him is 20/20 hindsight. Maybe the schools were closed for too long. Maybe masks weren’t as effective as some thought.
But Paul and his Republican colleagues staged a three-hour spectacle aimed at humiliating, blaming, insulting, and maybe indicting and prosecuting Fauci. When America faced the uncertainties of a potentially deadly pandemic, however, they bore no responsibility for the health of the nation. If they had, are they sure they would have been so dismissive of measures such as masks and lockdowns and social distancing?
COVID-19 killed a million Americans. At the beginning no one could guarantee that there wouldn’t be 10 million or 20 million deaths. The responsibility for the nation’s safety was borne by longtime public servants such as Fauci.
Would you have wanted that responsibility?
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