Fauci Pleads the Fifth

“I do not recall” sulks quietly in the corner.

Imagine going to see a legendary musician in concert [*you’re not even a fan, by the way, but everyone else was going and you had FOMO*] and instead of giving you three or four hours of career-spanning entertainment, the guy stands on stage and repeats a single line from some song he didn’t even write, over and over and over. One-hundred-and-eleven times, to be exact. For three and a half hours. That basically sums up Anthony Fauci’s performance at yesterday’s Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing to investigate the origins of the pandemic and the U.S. government’s response to it.

You don’t say, LOL.

Senator Rand Paul, the committee chair, opened the session like a man who’d been waiting years to light a fuse—and finally had a match. He laid out the timeline methodically. The gain-of-function research, the private emails routed around FOIA, the diary entries that directly contradicted public testimony, the cozy backchanneling with Big Tech to silence “disinformation” and dissent. He wasn’t grandstanding. He was the ghost of Mary Alice Young recapping last week’s cliffhanger—calm, unhurried, and absolutely certain about where the bodies were buried.

Then it was time for Fauci to be sworn in (you know, because placing your hand on a Bible automatically activates some kind of lie-suppressor gene, even in pathological perjurers). With the audacity of a man who is blanketed in lawyers and has nothing left to lose, the career public serpent took the mic and announced that he’d be pleading the Fifth—the handy amendment that gives you the right to refuse to say anything that could make you look guilty. (The idea being that the government has to build its own case and not rely on you to destroy yourself… which makes about as much sense in this setting as asking the burglar to lock up on his way out, but that’s a topic for another post.)

That’s right, America’s Weasel boldly announced that he would not be answering a single question. Not because he’d done anything rawng, mind you—but because Paul’s “unhinged obsession” with seeing him “behind bars” made it impossible for him to testify safely.

He actually played the victim card. The man who spent years as the nation’s unelected pandemic czar—the one who bragged about being synonymous with science while pulling social distance guidelines out of his filthy backhole and whose rules kept families from celebrating holidays and being with dying loved ones, destroyed countless lives and livelihoods, and sentenced millions of American kids to a social and academic abyss they’ll spend decades trying to claw their way out of—had the nerve to portray himself as the injured party in this scenario. The irony was thicker than the white, fibrous clots embalmers can’t stop finding in corpses since the Covid vaccine rollout.

“On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the 5th Amendment of the Constitution.”

Venice Waylon@CommonPeaceful

Here, I’ve saved everyone the time and condensed the entire Fauci hearing.

1:08 PM · Jul 29, 2026 · 714 Views

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The career criminal—whose entire testimony consisted of repeating that 21-word sentence more than nine dozen times—showed up with a legal entourage roughly the size of a basketball starting lineup. (As one does when one has done absolutely nothing wrong, ever. Ahem.) One of them, attorney David Schertler, apparently missed the memo that defense counsel doesn’t get speaking parts in congressional hearings and kept interrupting the proceedings. Chairman Rand Paul issued a warning. Schertler persisted. Paul got louder. Schertler continued to prattle. Paul finally ordered him to be physically removed by Capitol Police, noting dryly that Fauci still had “the other half dozen attorneys” for emotional support.

The room erupted in applause.

She was a whole thing, TBH.

Lawmakers took turns alternately extoling and deriding the tenured hack of the administrative state. Democrats, predictably, fawned over Fauci like a visiting dignitary. Senator Richard “Revolving Door” Blumenthal read a prepared statement from Fauci’s exiled attorney (a never-event in a Senate hearing, BTW). Senator Andy Kim read actual poetry into the record. Because nothing says “serious oversight of a man who was more concerned with Julia Roberts calling him the coolest man on the planet than pandemic preparedness” like a few adoring lines of iambic pentameter.

The notable exception on the left: Senator John Fetterman—who ditched the hoodie in favor of an actual suit, so you know he was serious—expressed his own regret for being blinded by partisan politics. A decade ago, if you’d told me I’d have John Fetterman as the only adult in the Democratic room on my bingo card, I’d have politely suggested getting your meds checked.

Republicans, meanwhile, came with flamethrowers. Senator Josh Hawley unleashed a string of absurdly basic questions (“What day of the week is it today? What color tie are you wearing? What color is the carpet in front of you?”) before cutting to the legal chase: “Let’s get one thing straight: you don’t have any rights under the Fifth Amendment. The Supreme Court has been clear for a century and more. Brown v. Walker, 1896. ‘When he has been pardoned, he may not stand upon his privilege’.” If squirming were an Olympic sport, Fauci would have gone home with a gold.

Rand Paul echoed the privilege point, making it clear Fauci was likely in contempt of Congress by invoking 5A, which requires a “reasonable fear of prosecution.” That is not something Fauci can claim. Like, at all. On account of the pardon. But he risked the contempt charge anyway. And the only reason you’d do that is if you knew that you couldn’t possibly answer congressional questioning without perjuring yourself.

Imagine assembling a human shield made up of the sleaziest attorneys on the planet and their best advice is, “Perjury’s a felony. Contempt’s a timeout. Take the timeout.”

The hearing’s knockout blow came from Senator Bernie Moreno, who recalled the story of a woman who was arrested—thanks to Fauci’s mandates—for not wearing a mask at her son’s outdoor football game. He was so incensed by that spectacle that he walked away from the private sector and launched a bid for the U.S. Senate with a singular mission: to one day sit across from Fauci and ask, “Who the f*ck do you think you were for doing that?”

And that’s exactly what he did. On the record. In a Senate hearing.

“It is a total disgrace what you did to this country,” Moreno continued. “And if my Democrat colleagues are standing there defending you, I hope the voters of the United States of America watch the clips of every one of you doting on a guy who was more interested in being a celebrity than saving American people. I will make it my mission to make certain that every single one of those Democrats will see that clip over and over and over again. Because there is no defense of what you did.”

Colorful language aside, he wasn’t wrong. Nor was he done. He asked everyone in the room suffering from pandemic PTSD to stand. A majority rose. Moreno asked Fauci to turn around and acknowledge them. The cockroach refused.

MORENO: “Will you apologize—just apologize—to the people you harmed through your actions? Do you have the dignity to just say you’re sorry?”

FAUCI: “On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the 5th Amendment of the Constitution.”

Fauci’s silence was more incriminating than any answer he could have possibly given. Yes, his sweeping pardon covers any and all “offenses against the United States”—meaning federal charges are dead and the ashes have been scattered. But states can still bring criminal charges, and Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier has already—within hours of the hearing—announced that his office is launching an investigation into Fauci. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna urged other states to follow suit.

“Dr. ‘Mengele’ Fauci may be protected by a federal pardon but that does not hold against state prosecution and civil lawsuits,” Luna wrote on X. “He is and will go down in history as one of the darkest souls who has ever been in federal government.”

Those suits may never end in a conviction, but they will bring discovery. Yes, we’ve seen the damning diaries. Those were the appetizer course. Discovery is the full-blown buffet—not just Fauci’s own recollections but emails, texts, NIH internal records, exchanges with pharma execs and tech bros, grant docs, the whole messy enchilada. The physical embodiment of The Science™ himself is about to have his professional dirty laundry hung out in the town square. And unlike Fraudci, documents don’t get to plead the Fifth.

I expect he’ll play the same game in a civil deposition—sitting there like Pete the Repeat Parrot reciting his 21-word mantra. The difference at the state level is that in a civil case, the court can instruct the jury that it may draw what’s known as an adverse inference from the silence. Translation: if he pleads the Fifth, the fact-finders get to logically assume his answers would have been damning. And when the only thing standing between you and a conviction is your refusal to say “I didn’t do it,” you’re not protecting yourself. You’re turning yourself in.

In all likelihood and as much as I hate to admit it, Anthony Fauci will die a free man. The calendar isn’t doing him any favors and the system protects its own. But I take comfort in the thought that he’ll be forced to spend whatever years he has left being repeatedly run through the subpoena shredder and watching his legacy be destroyed like a white sofa in a room full of chocolate-covered toddlers.