Fauci Takes the Fifth: What Is He Hiding?

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**SPEAKER_3** (1:01)
Ditch the clowns on the left.

**Michael Smerconish** (1:02)
And the jokers on the right.

**TC Cannon** (1:03)
And join Michael Smerconish right here, in the middle.

**Michael Smerconish** (1:07)
This is The Smerconish Podcast for Independent Minds.

**Michael Smerconish** (1:11)
Hang on. Stop voting. Dr. Fauci has just taken the fifth in front of a Senate committee. Now, can you cast an aspersion on him as a result of that? No, you really can't. It's complicated. I'm going to lay it out for you in terms of what this means. Yes, he has a pardon, and the pardon is retroactive. Going back, I think, to 2014, he invoked the Fifth Amendment because he said to Senator Rand Paul and the other members of the committee, I'm here for one purpose. I'm paraphrasing, of course. But I'm here for one purpose. You're hoping you can trip me up and indict me for perjury, for which I don't have protection from the law. And consequently, I'm going to take the Fifth. So now they're going through this drill where, and I mean like now, as in this minute in real time, where Dr. Fauci is sitting there in front of the committee and Rand Paul is just persisting and asking a series of questions and Fauci is answering none of them. He already served notice, I'm taking the Fifth. So consequently, this is all kind of theater at this point. They could go home right now. They only, Fauci only began like 10 minutes ago.
So there were opening statements from Rand Paul and the ranking member of this committee and now the only drill is going to be that questions will be asked of Dr. Fauci, presumably none of which he's going to answer.
So we've got time. I want to let this breathe. I've got a lot of things that I want to tell you and I think will begin this way. So when the diaries were made public, when the Fauci diaries were made public by Rand Paul, and I explained this in my newsletter note today. I'm so glad that I wrote on this. I think I got this expression from Chris Matthews, The Washington Read. Do you know what the Washington Read is of a book that comes out? You hope that there's an index, there's not always an index, you go to the index and you look for your name.
I did the Washington Read of the Fauci diaries. Why did I do it? I'm not caught up in his world, because so many stories have been written in the last 24 hours about his relationship with members of the media. And I had interviewed him a couple of times and I thought, huh, I wonder what he wrote about me.
So I'm in there twice. And by the way, I'm relying on I'm relying on standard search engines and artificial intelligence. And they could be mistaken. There are 1100 pages. In fact, I would expect them to be mistaken for reasons I'm about to elaborate. But there were two occasions that I could locate where I show up in the Fauci diaries. One of them was February 19, 2020, because he was my guest here on POTUS. And then February 22, 2020, he appeared with me on CNN. There's no editorial comment that I can see attached. Totally innocuous, but the dates are significant because that's like right in the most contested stretch of the 1100 pages that Rand Paul released on Monday.
On January 26, 2020, Fauci had privately written that, quote, the market, meaning the Wuhan market, the wet market was not the source, it was the amplifier.
And then his notes from a February 1 call record that most scientists on the line thought, quote, deliberate insertion was possible, unquote. Three weeks later, he sat with me and said, none of it. Origins came up only as geography. The virus unquestionably, he said, came from Wuhan.