The Fauci Pardon Proves He's a Monster

Joe Biden issued a fleet of preemptive pardons that proved the guilt of the pardoned. None was more egregious than the pardon of Dr. Anthony Fauci.

When Donald Trump won his decisive victory in November and the American people handed him a clear mandate to restore and expand on his MAGA agenda, he made history. Outgoing President Joe Biden has made a different kind of history—by issuing thousands of commutations and pardons for criminals, political allies, and family members. The one that got the most attention in the past few weeks was the pardon of his son, Hunter Biden, for any crimes he may or may not have committed (but probably did) since the days when Joe was Barack Obama’s vice president—a blanket pardon stretching all the way back a decade to 2014. The obvious implication: Hunter Biden needed that pardon for a decade of likely criminal behavior.

None of Biden’s pardons, however, reflected his utter disdain for the American people more than the preemptive pardon he issued for Dr. Anthony Fauci on his last day in office. Like Hunter Biden, Joe’s pardon of Dr. Fauci was preemptive, blanket, and started on Jan 1, 2014. Unlike Hunter Biden, Fauci has never sat in the defendant’s chair in a court of law. He’s never been convicted of a crime. So one wonders why Biden pardoned him at all.

Fauci oversaw some of the most draconian, un-American, unconstitutional actions the federal government has ever undertaken. As a lifelong unelected and largely unaccountable bureaucrat, and the highest-paid employee of the federal government, Fauci grew his fiefdom into a taxpayer-funded empire. Woe be unto whomever challenged his authority.

So Fauci grew too big for his britches. He bureaucratized the merger of government and science and controlled vast swaths of public research funding. He held funding power over the entire infectious disease research sector. But Biden’s preemptive, blanket pardon begs the question: What did Fauci do that required a presidential pardon?

(READ MORE: After Hunter, How About Pardoning the Gun Owners Biden Criminalized?)

Biden Pays Off the Fauci Fan Boys and Girls

As has been his calling card for the past four years, President Biden routinely resorts to straw man arguments to push his agenda, which he frames as an epic fight against evil right-wingers who wish harm upon vulnerable communities. For instance, the Biden-Harris regime invented the narrative of a rise in white supremacist domestic terrorism out of thin air, and sent the entire intelligence community on a witch hunt instead of protecting America from actual terrorists.

The same goes for "The Science." By framing it as Republicans "pouncing" and engaging in conspiracy theories instead of asking legitimate questions about the origins of Covid-19 and the efficacy of the experimental vaccines, Biden and his handlers created a hostile environment in which they could work with relative impunity. Anyone who questioned "The Science" found themselves on the wrong end of a digital lynch mob.

Fauci’s ardent supporters—generally left-leaning and anti-Trump—came off more as groupies than gatherers of facts. "Trust the science," they told those of us who doubted the experimental coronavirus vaccines. "But they’re really criticizing science, because I represent science. That’s dangerous," Fauci told CBS News.

For his part, Dr. Fauci knows how to play the game. Upon the news of his preemptive pardon, he issued a statement:

I am eternally grateful to President Joe Biden, not just for this preemptive pardon, but for his leadership and service to this nation, especially over the last four years. I wish this pardon weren’t necessary, but unfortunately, the political climate we are in now has made the need for one somewhat of a reality. I, like all of the other public servants, was just doing my job and upholding my oath, and I will always honor that. As he said, we did nothing wrong, but the baseless accusations and threats are real for me and my family. 

Dr. Fauci followed Biden’s lead, one dutifully parroted by the corporate media, that the only threats emanate from Trump and his supporters, who don’t follow the science. He has very clearly noticed the accolades he received through the coronavirus crises and has accepted the mainstream media title of the man who saved us from Covid. His head and his ego swelled with the fawning and feting he received.

fauci.jpgImage via New York Post

The Ultimate Swamp Creature—a Bureaucrat with Unlimited Power and No Accountability

Playing the game and manipulating the media are skills Fauci honed to perfection in his time in the Swamp.

Dr. Fauci retired in 2023 from his position of head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). He first started at NIH in 1968, becoming the head of NIAID in 1984 at the height of the AIDS crisis. President George W. Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2008, and the American public generally regards him as a hero, thanks to fawning, propagandistic coverage in the media.

But the luster has faded from his image as Americans increasingly realize what he’s really done to them. His former devotee, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of health policy at Stanford University and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, has been nominated by President Trump to lead the NIH. Were Fauci not retired, Bhattacharya would be his new boss.

Bhattacharya co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, a petition that clapped back on the draconian society-wide lockdowns governments implemented in response to Covid-19. Fauci oversaw much of those draconian measures, giving often contradictory advice depending on who had his ear. Bhattacharya recently wrote at Reason Magazine of the erosion of his former admiration for Dr. Fauci and his decades of public service. In "The Man Who Thought He Was Science," Bhattacharya paints a picture of a megalomaniacal bureaucrat whom history will ultimately regard as a failure—and worse.

Fauci has produced a prodigious volume of written works throughout his career, ranking as the 32nd-most cited living researcher by Google Scholar citations. He co-edited a broadly used textbook on internal medicine. And he also published his memoirs in 2024—a book Bhattacharya repeatedly refers to as giving an "incomplete" record of his work that "omits vital details about his failures."

He says of Dr. Fauci, "His life story is a Greek tragedy."

What Did Fauci Do to Earn a Preemptive Pardon?

Of course, the institutional Left and the corporate media will unite with radical Democrats to declare Fauci a victim of Republicans pouncing. He needs a preemptive pardon to avoid the mobs of unhinged right-wing, anti-science troglodytes who would unleash a whole of government lawfare campaign upon the sainted savior of public health. (If nothing else convinces you that leftism is a mental disorder marked by the classic signs of projection, this will do it.) Indeed, that’s essentially what Biden said in his blanket preemptive pardon of Fauci.

But in examining Fauci’s extensive record of public service, troubling trends stand out.

The mishandling of the AIDS crisis

In 1983, while Fauci served at the NIH, he authored a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) that set off the full public panic around AIDS. At the time, the world knew AIDS to be a disease primarily affecting gay men, passed through direct exchange of bodily fluids. Though the virus had not been identified, the means of disease transmission was well understood.

Then the world learned of an infant who had contracted AIDS. Even with an incomplete understanding of the disease, the world assumed the baby had contracted it while still in the womb, via the mother. Instead, Dr. Fauci wrote a letter to JAMA speculating that the disease might be passed via "routine, close contact, as within a family household." It is impossible to overstate what a panic this caused, even though Fauci, in the duplicitous manner that would mark his career, carefully used language that absolved him of blame for making a specific pronouncement. He long ago mastered the art of plausible deniability, but the media ran with it anyway. It helped that Fauci, in his letter to JAMA, speculated that if what he was saying were true, it could put a much larger portion of the American population at risk of a deadly disease with no known cure. Suddenly, it wasn’t just gay men; it became a crisis affecting everybody.

The research funding began to flow, and Fauci became increasingly in demand for media hits.

He dedicated his career to discovering a vaccine for the HIV virus. It isn’t hard to speculate that he wanted to become the next Jonas Salk, developing a legacy to be lauded long after he was gone.

Of course, setting off a public panic and having an outsized ego don’t violate any laws, and in any event the statute of limitations has long since run on any potential liability. But this period of Dr. Fauci’s career informs what happened when he was put in charge of the outbreak of another virus.

The mishandling of the Covid-19 pandemic

As Bhattacharya wrote at Reason:

By any measure, the American COVID response was a catastrophic failure. More than 1.2 million deaths have been attributed to COVID itself, and deaths from all causes have stayed high long after the number of COVID deaths themselves diminished. In many states, particularly blue states, children were kept out of school for a year and a half or longer, with devastating effects on their learning and future health and prosperity.

Bhattacharya describes it as "coercive" policy regarding vaccinations. He shows excessive professional courtesy here, as it really amounted to Stasi-like tactics to force Americans to take the shot. Fauci clearly, repeatedly, brazenly lied about the efficacy of the vaccines and their side effects. Millions of children lost years of educational and social development as lockdowns forced them into online learning—none of which the public education establishment excelled at. The federal government passed stimulus after stimulus to keep the economy alive as millions of Americans could not go to work, and refused to go back after things opened up again. That astonishing level of spending—upwards of five trillion dollars in a two-year period—disincentivized workers and created a massive spike in inflation.

Nothing even close to this kind of societal reaction had ever occurred, and Dr. Fauci lied the entire way through it. A master media manipulator, he stoked the panic and flooded the zone with often contradictory information. When hauled in front of Congress to answer questions, he evaded and obfuscated.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), a board-certified ophthalmologist, had Fauci in his sights from the beginning of the pandemic. The radical leftist site Raw Story reported on his comments in December 2024:

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) continued his yearslong crusade against Dr. Anthony Fauci, telling a conservative radio host Monday that he would again pursue criminal charges against the country’s former top infectious disease expert with President-elect Donald Trump in the White House.

And the idea that President Joe Biden is considering a preemptive pardon of Fauci didn’t seem to phase the Kentucky senator, who has forcefully lambasted Fauci for his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, including in an infamous January 2022 shouting match during a Senate Health Committee hearing.

"I've sent criminal referrals on Anthony Fauci twice to the Department of Justice without a response. I will send those referrals again," Paul told Glenn Beck on Monday. "If they preemptively pardon Fauci, it will seal his fate as the architect, author, and Godfather of the pandemic."

Whereas during the AIDS crisis Fauci’s ego possibly hadn’t gotten the best of him, by the time Covid-19 hit, he clearly considered himself indispensable to science, and above the law.

Gain-of-function research

The response to the pandemic was bad enough. But the origins of the virus, and the coverup of the research that created it, could constitute nothing short of crimes against humanity. The research site Just Facts reports:

In a 2012 commentary published by the American Society for Microbiology, Anthony Fauci wrote that a "moratorium on gain-of-function research" for a "highly pathogenic" influenza virus "should continue" until certain conditions are met, but "scientists working in this field might say - as indeed I have said - that the benefits of such experiments and the resulting knowledge outweigh the risks." He added, "It is more likely that a pandemic would occur in nature, and the need to stay ahead of such a threat is a primary reason for performing an experiment that might appear to be risky." During a federal "gain-of-function research funding pause," Fauci funded such experiments on "bat coronaviruses" in the lead-up to the Covid-19 pandemic. Emails released in 2023 prove that Fauci suppressed scientific evidence indicating the virus came from a lab. 

A 2023 report from the House Committee on Oversight, which investigated the "lab leak" theory, blasted Fauci and his boss, retired NIH director Dr. Francis Collins, for suppressing the story that the virus may have originated in a lab. What nobody disputes is that the NIH funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which became a Biosafety Level 4 lab in 2017. Only two years later, the SARS-CoV-2 virus escaped, becoming the Covid-19 pandemic.

Understandably, Dr. Fauci denies any culpability for the catastrophe that ensued. The House Oversight Committee said in its report, "There is still more work to be done to hold public health officials accountable for their actions during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Select Subcommittee emphasizes its outstanding request for transcribed interviews and documents from Dr. Fauci and Dr. Collins."

Gain-of-function research, which involves making viruses more transmissible in order to study potential cures, was deemed so dangerous that the Obama administration banned it.

The leftist outlet ProPublica confirmed in 2021 that NIAID funded the gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab.

The dogs

In 2021, a nonprofit organization dedicated to ending scientific research that uses animal testing released a bombshell report. The White Coat Waste (WCW) project traced public funding from NIAID, signed off by Dr. Fauci, to experiments on dogs in Africa that can get attacked by flies that carry disease. The nature of the experiments seemed particularly cruel to the animals, so much so that the scientists involved had the vocal cords of the dogs removed to avoid excessive noise from pain vocalizations.

Whether or not one believes animal testing is categorically cruel and inhumane, many experiments have advanced scientific knowledge and produced treatments for humans, pets, and livestock. The details of this particular study, however, are not for the squeamish. WCW noted that the editor of the journal which published the results of the study admitted to a conflict of interest after he was caught trying to remove information about NIAID funding to the journal.

Fauci spent several pages in his memoirs defending himself against these accusations, calling criticism a "fever-dream" and "lunacy from the far-right." He tells the story of the consoling phone call he happily accepted from his old friend, Barack Obama.

Criminal? Probably not, but that wouldn’t look great to a jury of Fauci’s peers. And, again, Dr. Fauci is revealed as a slippery operator.

Are Preemptive Pardons Even Legal?

This is no mere academic question. The left-leaning Brookings Institute—the most frequently cited think tank in the U.S. by media and politicians—wrote in 2021:

There are several reasons to expect that a broad pre-emptive pardon would be held invalid. A pardon which doesn’t specify in sufficient detail the offenses pardoned conflicts with the notion that accepting a pardon is an implicit admission of guilt . . . In addition, it is unlikely that the framers would have vested in the president the power to issue pardons for offenses of which he was unaware.

What seems beyond doubt, however, is "the notion that accepting a pardon is an implicit admission of guilt." Language in the 1915 Supreme Court case, Burdick v. United States, says doing so "carries an imputation of guilt; acceptance a confession of it." One lawyer, Kevin N. Anderson, opined that President Trump should consider pursuing some of the folks Biden pardoned to test the limits of presidential pardoning power:

The Pardon Power is not as absolute as some may think. The Constitution’s pardon clause (the first clause of Article II Section 2) expressly sets forth two limits: First, there is a declared constitutional exclusion of "Cases of Impeachment." Second, it only applies to "Offenses against the United States." This has been held to mean federal criminal offenses. State criminal offenses and federal or state civil claims are not covered.

This leaves some pretty big holes—even at the federal level. For example, while criminal contempt of court might be pardoned, civil contempt would not be. Contempt of Congress also can be civil or criminal. Whether the President may issue a pardon for criminal contempt of Congress, has been the subject of debate but has not been addressed by the Supreme Court. Civil contempt seems easier, but also has not been tested in the context of a pardon.

Paul D. Thacker wrote at RealClearInvestigations that Dr. Fauci’s legal troubles have only just begun. He cites numerous instances in which Fauci possibly perjured himself in congressional testimony. Thacker notes the pardon means Fauci can’t invoke the Fifth Amendment were he to again testify before Congress. A source in the Trump transition team told Thacker, "We expected this and look at it as a predicate to get truth from people who can no longer use the Fifth Amendment. Now we can bring every one of them in front of a grand jury." 

The Investigations Have Only Just Begun

This will go down as one of the most consequential events in human history. Dr. Anthony Fauci believed he and he alone could save humanity from the virus that came out of the lab he funded. He believed he could evade responsibility for his policy recommendations, the millions of deaths attributed to his virus, and the untold number of extra deaths caused by the experimental vaccines. He believed he could talk his way out of any culpability. The compliant media first propped him up, then became attack dogs against his critics. Fauci thought he was so smart he could evade and defeat any mere United States senator, even one with a medical degree. And when the heat got a bit much, he knew he could count on his Democratic benefactors in the Obama-Biden-Harris constellation to shield him from legal ramifications.

We are about to witness history, as the Trump administration tests the legal limits of presidential pardon privileges. History will eventually reveal the head of NIAID may have started off with the best of intentions when he went to medical school, but he became a monster along the way.

Anthony Fauci actually believed he was science itself. And it’s all crashing down around him.

Jeff Reynolds is Senior Editor for Restoration News, specializing in energy and science policy, as well as dark money. Jeff is an author, editor, strategist, and public speaker. A prolific researcher and writer, he authored the book Behind the Curtain in 2019, which details the billionaires and foundations responsible for the radical left's ascension in American politics. Jeff graduated from Connecticut College with a bachelor's in Zoology. 

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