This Could Have Been the Reason Why Fauci Took the Fifth Over 100 Times

A hundred and something invocations of the Fifth Amendment. That's not a man protecting a legal position, that's a man who knows exactly what's in the paper trail and doesn't want to explain it under oath. Taibbi's dig through the diary entries gives us a pretty good guess as to why. This wasn't a humble public servant grinding through a once-in-a-century crisis. It was somebody who thought of himself as a celebrity, who knew by 2021 that vaccinated people were still catching the virus while the messaging kept insisting otherwise, and who had federal employees running around chasing cash prizes on his behalf during a national emergency.

None of this is a shock to anyone who watched the man's press conferences with a critical eye instead of a halo. But it's still something to see it confirmed in his own handwriting rather than inferred from body language. The gap between what he was telling the public and what he actually knew was not small, and it wasn't accidental. That's the part that should bother people regardless of party. You can disagree about lockdowns and masks and school closures forever. What's harder to argue with is a paper trail showing the guy in charge understood the vaccines weren't doing what he said they were doing, and kept saying it anyway.

The Fifth Amendment pleading makes more sense now. It's not proof of guilt in a courtroom sense, but it tells you where the man's head was at when Congress finally got him under oath. Somebody who believed his own hype for two years, who liked being treated like a rock star more than being accountable like a scientist, is exactly the kind of person who goes quiet the second the questions get specific.

We spent years being told that doubting Fauci was dangerous, fringe, even unpatriotic. Turns out the doubt was doing its job.