HOLY CRAP! Rep. Josh Hawley Goes Nuclear on Anthony Fauci…

Dr. Anthony Fauci walked into the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Wednesday expecting a hearing. What he got instead was a public reckoning, courtesy of two Republican senators who refused to let him hide behind lawyer talk and constitutional gamesmanship.

Senators Josh Hawley of Missouri and Bernie Moreno of Ohio spent their allotted time dismantling Fauci’s credibility piece by piece, and neither man held back.

The hearing came just days after Senator Rand Paul, chairman of the committee, released more than a thousand pages of Fauci’s personal pandemic diary, a trove of documents that has reignited scrutiny over how the nation’s former top infectious disease bureaucrat handled the COVID crisis behind closed doors.

From the opening moments, it was clear Fauci had no intention of answering anything substantive. He informed the committee in his opening statement that he would be invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination for the duration of the hearing. That decision set the tone for one of the most contentious congressional hearings in recent memory.

Hawley, a Yale Law graduate and former Missouri attorney general, wasted no time exposing the absurdity of Fauci’s legal strategy. He began by asking the doctor a series of harmless, everyday questions, simply to demonstrate that Fauci intended to stonewall the committee on literally everything.

“Nothing says honesty like taking the Fifth, huh, Doc? Let’s try something. What day of the week is it today?” Hawley asked. Fauci responded with his now-familiar refrain, declining to answer based on his Fifth Amendment rights.

Hawley pressed further, asking what color tie Fauci was wearing. Same answer. He asked what color the carpet was in front of him. Same answer again. It became a theater of the absurd, with a man once treated as America’s most trusted doctor unable, or unwilling, to confirm even the most trivial facts about his own surroundings.

Then Hawley delivered the line that cut to the heart of the matter. He reminded Fauci that his refusal to answer had no real legal footing, because Fauci received a full and unconditional pardon from President Biden on his final day in office. A person who has been pardoned, Hawley explained, cannot face criminal prosecution for the underlying conduct being asked about, which means the Fifth Amendment shield does not apply the way Fauci and his legal team wanted the public to believe.

“You don’t have any Fifth Amendment rights, because you’ve been pardoned,” Hawley told him bluntly.

Hawley did not stop there. He pivoted to accusations that Fauci used his position and federal employees to personally profit during the pandemic, pursuing cash awards and public recognition while Americans were losing jobs, businesses, and loved ones.

Hawley pointed to Fauci’s celebrity turn during the crisis, including an appearance on the cover of InStyle Magazine at a time when ordinary families were locked out of hospitals and unable to bury their dead with dignity.

The Missouri senator’s closing remarks were especially pointed. He told Fauci that he had done more damage to the credibility of American science than anyone in his lifetime and suggested Fauci go home and write that down in his diary for future generations to read.

If Hawley’s approach was methodical, Moreno’s was a full frontal assault. The Ohio senator, a former businessman who entered politics after selling his companies, did not bother with the diplomatic niceties typically extended to a man of Fauci’s former stature.

Moreno zeroed in on Fauci’s choice of legal counsel, attorney David Schertler, a lawyer known in Washington circles as the person people call when they are, in blunt terms, in serious legal trouble. Schertler previously represented former Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey, who was convicted on federal corruption charges involving gold bars and bribery.

“Do you feel like you’re in deep trouble?” Moreno asked Fauci directly, pointing out that hiring a lawyer with Schertler’s reputation sends its own message regardless of what Fauci says on the record.

Moreno then turned to the substance of the pandemic response itself, asking members of the public seated behind Fauci whether they believed the six-foot social distancing guidance was scientifically baseless and whether they viewed the extended mask mandates as excessive government overreach.

It was an unusual and theatrical move, but it drove home the senator’s larger point: the policies Fauci championed upended millions of American lives, shuttered small businesses, closed churches, and kept children out of classrooms for over a year, often without the rigorous scientific backing the public was led to believe existed.

The Ohio senator’s temper rose as he recounted his own decision years ago to leave the business world and enter public service, contrasting his own path with what he described as Fauci’s pattern of dodging accountability. Moreno did not mince words in his final assessment.

“Who the hell do you think you were for doing that?” Moreno asked, his voice rising. He told Fauci that despite a public health career spanning more than five decades, it would now end in what Moreno called total and complete disgrace.

He pressed Fauci to simply apologize to the millions of Americans harmed by his decisions. Fauci, predictably, declined to answer, invoking the Fifth Amendment once more.

According to a count circulating widely among conservative commentators and journalists present at the hearing, Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment rights more than seventy times throughout the session, a staggering figure for a man who has appeared before Congress on more than 250 occasions over his long career without ever previously resorting to the privilege.