Trump Slams Fauci as 'CRAZY' Before Senate Hearing
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- Trump posted on Truth Social ahead of Fauci's Senate testimony, calling his ideas 'CRAZY,' asserting he 'overrode' Fauci on Operation Warp Speed, and claiming more people died of COVID under Biden than under his administration.
- Trump said he 'inherited' Fauci — who advised presidents since Reagan — and accused him of trying to shut the country down; Trump said he instead let governors decide, praising Republican governors as doing a 'much better job' than Democrats.
- Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment at the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing led by Chair Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who subpoenaed him over a purported cover-up of US involvement in viral research at a Wuhan lab.
- Paul released more than 1,000 pages of Fauci's diary entries, which documented SARS-CoV-2 jumping from animals to humans and described a Wuhan wet market as 'the amplifier' rather than the source of the virus.
- Fauci's diary entries show he took credit for state lockdowns and disparaged Trump's press-briefing style as 'very rambling and disorganized,' according to excerpts The Hill reviewed.
- Biden preemptively pardoned Fauci before leaving office specifically to shield him from potential prosecution by the Trump administration.
- Trump also claimed he advised Biden against retaining Fauci, accusing Biden of giving the doctor 'vast destructive power' and declaring 'the rest is history!'
Why it matters: The public Trump broadside, paired with Fauci's Fifth Amendment invocation and Paul's release of 1,000+ pages of diary entries, signals this hearing is functioning less as a fact-finding probe and more as a Republican-led political prosecution of the pandemic-era public health establishment — even with Biden's preemptive pardon already insulating Fauci from criminal exposure.
