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- [00:00]
A
Hey, everybody.
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Welcome back to Bulwark Takes. I am Jonathan Cohn, author of the Breakdown newsletter, where we talk about policy and healthcare and who. Boy, do we have a lot to talk about today. That is because Anthony Fauci was on Capitol Hill. Senator Rand Paul called him to testify, wanted to go over what Fauci did and said during the COVID 19 pandemic. In particular, Paul wanted to press Fauci on whether he had misled the American public about the state of the virus, masking various findings on different therapies. In addition to that, Rand Paul very famously is a proponent of the lab leak theory. This is the idea that COVID 19 emerged from Chinese virology experiment, as opposed to making the jump from animal to human, which is the theory that the majority of scientists still believe. Rand Paul has long held that it was really this Chinese research, which in turn had been backed or funded by the US Government in part because of decisions that Anthony Fauci made. He wanted real Fauci about that. Now, you may be wondering, wait a minute. Haven't I heard this all before? Haven't we had hearings like this? Haven't Fauci and Paul already squared off in Congress? Yes, this has happened before. We've done this before many times. This is an ongoing cause. Rand Paul says, hey, wait, we have new information. He was able to obtain some diaries that were on HHS computers with the federal government that when Fauci left office, Trump administration was able to get their hands on them. Now, these diaries, they do not appear to have any kind of smoking gun, although they do provide some interesting insights. But they gave Republicans a chance to really wail on Fauci and not just Rand Paul. Ron Johnson, who has his own conspiracy theories, he used the hearing to expound on those theories and to attack Fauci. Tommy Tuberville said he was gonna go after Fauci, that in fact he was gonna talk to people in Alabama and the state, state officials there if there was some way to bring FAU testify there and maybe prosecute him there for crimes of some kind of deception during the pandemic. And prosecution was what hung over all of this. Republicans have said repeatedly they think actually Anthony Fauci is criminally liable. They want to throw him in jail. And of course, this being the Trump administration, it's a serious threat, and it's why Fauci took the Fifth Amendment throughout the hearing, creating this really bizarre spectacle on Capitol Hill. I got a chance to talk about all of this and what was in the diaries today on Ms. Now with Antonia Hilton, here's how that went on the Hill.
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Right now, Republican senators fixated on grilling One man. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former top infectious disease expert is testifying right now in front of the Senate Homeland Security Committee under a subpoena that was ordered by Republican Chairman Rand Paul of Kentucky. Paul used today as an opportunity to try and catch the the decades long disease expert committing perjury before Congress, which would be a crime and an offense that would not be protected by former President Biden's preemptive pardon for Fauci before he left office.
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Dr. Fauci, were the scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology capable of inserting a furin cleavage site into a coronavirus? On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the fifth amendment of the Constitution.
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All right, let's bring in Ms. Now, Capitol Hill reporter Kevin Fry. We also have with us senior national correspondent at the Bulwark, Jonathan Cohn and former chief medical officer at the CDC, Dr. Deborah Howery. Jonathan, I want your take first on what we've heard from the lawmakers who've had the chance to ask him questions this morning. None of them have really been answered, but do you think any of them asked serious questions or would you say that the majority of this has been about scoring political points? I ask because Dr. Ven Gupta was on with my colleague Stephanie Rule just a little bit ago and he said that, for example, Senator Lankford had some questions that he thought were actually interesting and fair. And so I wonder if you can basically help us cut through the noise here, separate sort of fact from fiction and from drama.
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Yeah. So I mean, look, there are a few questions that are legitimate. And looking back over the pandemic, I mean, I think a lot of us have said for a long time it was a, you know, it was a once in a century challenge. We did some things right, we did some things wrong. Human beings were making decisions. We should continue to look back and say, have a sober examination of, of what we got right, what we got wrong, so we could do better next time. The problem is that that is not what this show is. This is a show trial. This is Rand Paul deeply invested in this narrative that there was a conspiracy? Is Ron Johnson deeply invested in this narrative that scientists are misleading the country? Is Don deeply invested in taking out vengeance on Fauci who he thinks helped
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ruin his first term?
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And that is what this is all about. And that is why Fauci doesn't want to answer questions because he fears legitimately. The real purpose of this is not to have a careful, thoughtful retrospective on how we handle the last pandemic and do better next time. It is an effort to get him extract vengeance.