Anthony Fauci is 85 years old, retired, and somehow needs a legal defense fund. Let that one sit for a minute.
The man who ran the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for nearly four decades, who advised seven presidents, who was on every television screen in America for two solid years telling you to mask up, lock down, and roll up your sleeve, now has his lawyers passing the hat. Reuters broke the story this week. His legal team has set up a trust to cover the “substantial resources” needed to respond to a growing pile of state and federal investigations into his handling of the pandemic. A trust with an independent corporate trustee, they say, so Fauci himself has no control over the money. Very tidy. Very on-the-level. Nothing to see here.
Here is what we know. In January, Joe Biden slapped a preemptive pardon on Fauci on his way out the door, shielding him from criminal charges for anything he said or did in previous years. A pardon. For a man who spent his entire career as a government scientist and was never charged with a crime. You do not pardon someone who has nothing to hide. You pardon someone whose friends know the receipts are coming.
And the receipts are coming. Senator Rand Paul, who has been after Fauci for years, asked the Justice Department to prosecute him after Fauci sat before a congressional hearing in July and invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times. Over 100 times. This is a man who had testified before Congress more than 250 times in his career and never once took the Fifth until he was sitting across from people who actually had his private diary. Because Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spent eight months digging through government servers and found Fauci’s personal diary entries, which Paul then released publicly, along with private text messages pulled from Fauci’s government cell phone.
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier issued a subpoena to investigate whether Fauci “personally profited off the COVID ‘guidance’ he issued.” West Virginia and Louisiana signed on to back that effort. So now Fauci needs lawyers in at least three states just to handle document production.
And then there is David Morens, Fauci’s former senior adviser, who pleaded guilty this week to conspiring to evade public records laws and conceal government documents related to grant research funding and the pandemic. Paul is already asking whether that case implicates his old boss. You tell me. Your top aide is pleading guilty to hiding documents, and you are the one who ran the institute, but we are supposed to believe you knew nothing about any of it?
Fauci’s lawyer, David Schertler, calls all of this “unfounded and frivolous” and “shameful harassment of an honorable man.” That is quite a performance. This is the same honorable man who told you masks do not work, then told you they do, then told you to wear two. The same man who said the virus almost certainly came from nature while his own emails showed he was privately worrying about gain-of-function research in Wuhan. The same man who had his lawyer physically escorted out of a Senate hearing room by Rand Paul’s staff for trying to interject during questioning.
The defense fund will not pay Fauci directly, his lawyers insist. Any money left over after the litigation goes to charity. How generous. The structure is designed to look clean because these people always design things to look clean. An independent trustee, an independent expert adviser reviewing invoices. It is the same playbook every swamp creature uses when the heat turns up. Make it look institutional. Make it look aboveboard. Count on the press to nod along.
Fauci spent two years as the most powerful unelected official in the country. He dictated policy that shuttered businesses, closed schools, and put millions of Americans out of work. Over a million people died on his watch. And now he needs a legal defense fund because the questions he spent years dodging are finally catching up to him.
The swamp does not investigate itself. It fundraises.