ABOUT DR. FAUCI, THE FAUCI DIARIES, THE 5TH AMENDMENT, AND CONTEMPT OF CONGRESS – INCLUDES BOTH VERSIONS OF THE DIARIES
by Anne P. Mitchell, Esq. – attorney, law professor emeritus, and author of Federal law
As you probably heard, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee just voted to refer Dr. Anthony Fauci to the DOJ to be charged with criminal contempt of Congress for failing to answer their questions during his recent hearing and, instead, invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
This is confusing to people because first of all, generally speaking, the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination is thought to be absolute.
And it is.
Except for when it isn’t.
You see there are a few specific exceptions when you can’t invoke the 5th. Those include when you have a full Presidential pardon. Dr. Fauci has one of those.
(Other exceptions include when you have a full Congressional pardon; when the statute of limitations for any crime that might be covered by the testimony has run; and a few other even more obscure situations.)
BUT Dr. Fauci’s Presidential pardon, from President Biden, only covers any actions that he may have taken up through January 19, 2025, when Biden’s term ended.
Now couple that with Rand Paul repeatedly saying, for *years* (since at least 2021), that Fauci should be behind bars. It was obviously clear to Fauci and his attorneys that Paul would seize on anything – *including things Fauci did post 1/19/25* – to try to prosecute him.
Remember, again, Fauci’s pardon only covers activity up to January 19, 2025.
The Senate committee has already referred it to the DOJ, who will convene a grand jury. The grand jury will likely vote to indict, given this DOJ’s track record, and then a criminal complaint will be filed against Fauci with the Court. Then Fauci will defend against it. This is going to tee up a legal battle that will require the Court to carefully consider the facts on each side. It is very likely that the Court will have to conduct what is known as a “particularized inquiry”, matching each question to which Fauci pleaded the 5th against what was covered by the pardon.
Meanwhile, and relatedly I am sure, the “Fauci Diaries” have been released in two forms: 1. A highly edited version, released on behalf of Rand Paul by the Brownstone Institute (apparently most of the editing was to remove news pieces that Fauci included in the original diaries), and 2. the *full* document. The first document is 478 pages, the second document is 1,141 pages – I am including both for Notes from the Front members.
You may be wondering how Rand Paul got Dr. Fauci’s seemingly-personal diaries. You see, they were actually being kept on government-owned servers, as he was a government employee at the time. And so while originally Paul had originally claimed that he had “used his subpoena powers” to obtain the diaries, RFKjr. simply dug them up from the government servers and handed them over to Paul. In fact just a couple of weeks ago RFKjr crowed on Fox News, and I quote, “It took us about eight months to dig these out of 11 separate servers, where they had been sequestered and secreted, and we handed them over this week to Rand Paul and Ron Johnson.”
I guess he needs *something* about which to be proud.
I’m not going to go into what’s in the diaries, but I’m certain that the fine-tooth combing of these documents is, in part, why Fauci pleaded the 5th; it would be impossible for him to have read every word before his hearing, let alone memorized what he had said in order to not contradict himself during his testimony.
And, and this is important: if he *had* contradicted himself during last month’s testimony, that would have led to a charge of lying to Congress, which, because it would have occurred in 2026, would *not* have been covered by his pardon. I’m *certain* that is what Paul was hoping for. And because he didn’t get it, and because he’s determined to put Fauci in jail, he’s left with hoping that a contempt of Congress prosecution may lead to those bars (the penalty for contempt of Congress includes fines and up to a year in jail).
I will go on record here as saying it is *extremely* unlikely that Paul is going to win this one – if it *does* go to trial, I’m 99.9999% certain that Fauci will win.
As I said, I’m not going to go into the content of the diaries here, you can delve into them yourself. I will, however, leave you with this snippet from the very last entry, from December of 2022 (and again, I’m including the full diaries for Notes from the Front members):
“Dec. 17, 2022: It is clear (I have not been reporting it every day) that the far, extreme right and Qanon literally hate me”
They’re still around.
I don’t blame Fauci one bit for going the route of pleading the 5th.
Notes from the Front members: both versions of the Fauci diaries are in your inbox now.
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P.S. If you actually read all the way to the bottom please leave a sentence in a comment that includes the word “obsession”. It will show me that my efforts aren’t in vain and that people actually *do* read these things, and it will drive those who just skim crazy wondering just why everyone is talking about obsessions ;~)
(The above was provided by me, Anne P. Mitchell, Esq. – attorney and law professor emeritus.)
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