In a powerful letter coming in the wake of former President Joe Biden admitting that he didn’t even review many of the last-minute pardons signed via autopen before they were signed and announced, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) demanded that Attorney General Pam Bondi start prosecuting Dr. Fauci and that she could do so because his pardon’s validity is up in the air.
For reference, many Republicans have questioned whether the last-minute pardons released by the Biden Administration, pardons that including letting powerful politicians like former Rep. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger off the hook, along with much-despised bureaucrats and officials like Gen. Mark Milley and Dr. Fauci.
It was Fauci that Sen. Paul zeroed in on in his letter to AG Bondi. He began by noting that the DOJ needs to investigate Fauci’s apparent lies, saying, “I write to renew my previous requests for the Department of Justice (DOJ) to open an investigation into former Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Anthony Fauci’s testimony before the United States Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions on May 11, 2021.”
Continuing, he addressed the pardon problem head-on, noting that it should be treated as a non-issue for now because of the autopen problem, along with the fact that Biden might not even have known about it. He said, “This most recent request stems from new allegations that call into question the validity of Dr. Fauci’s purported pardon.”
Sen. Paul then explained the exact moment that AG Bondi and the DOJ should specifically investigate, noting that Dr. Fauci had lied to him. He said, “In response to my questioning at the May 11, 2021 hearing, Dr. Fauci testified that “the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology”. In a subsequent hearing, I warned Dr. Fauci of the criminal implications of lying to Congress and offered him an opportunity to recant his previous statements. In response, Dr. Fauci stated that he had “never lied before the Congress” and “d[id] not retract that statement.”
Adding to that, he noted that Dr. Fauci had been caught in the lie by the House, saying, “On July 13, 2023 the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released an email sent by Dr. Fauci on February 1, 2020, regarding a conference call concerning the origins of COVID-19, which included Dr. Fauci, Dr. Francis Collins, and several scientific researchers. In the email, Dr. Fauci acknowledges concerns that COVID-19 may have been genetically engineered due to the fact that gain-of-function research was occurring in Wuhan prior to the pandemic.”
A bit later on in the letter, after further drilling down on Fauci’s lies, Sen. Paul noted that what he did was a very serious crime. He wrote, “Under 18 U.S.C. § 1001, whoever ‘makes any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation’ as part of ‘any investigation or review, conducted pursuant to the authority of any committee, subcommittee, commission or office of the Congress, consistent with applicable rules of the House or Senate’ is subject to criminal fines and imprisonment of up to five years.”
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Concluding, Sen. Paul once again addressed the matter of the pardon, explaining to AG Bondi that it appears illegitimate for constitutional reasons and other legal reasons. He said, “On January 19, 2025, Dr. Fauci was issued a full and unconditional pardon for any offenses that he may have committed or taken part in since 2014. Dr. Fauci was included among a group of individuals granted unprecedented preemptive pardons on President Joe Biden’s final day in office. However, new information has revealed that these pardons were executed via autopen, with no documented confirmation that the President personally reviewed or approved each individual grant of clemency. According to reports, White House staff authorized the use of the autopen to issue the clemency documents. This raises serious constitutional and legal concerns about the legitimacy of Dr. Fauci’s pardon.”
Watch HHS Secretary RFK Jr. sound off on Dr. Fauci and his pardon here:
Featured image credit: The White House from Washington, DC, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Anthony_Fauci_2020.jpg