Why Fauci’s Refusal To Answer Congress Puts His Pardon In Jeopardy

 By choosing the Fifth, Fauci may have abandoned his pardon and opened himself to criminal prosecution for any crimes during the pardon period.

r. Anthony Fauci’s appearance before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee last week quickly stalled when, in his opening statement, Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination. He was noticeably nervous, visibly shaking, and devoid of the arrogance he previously brought to congressional hearings.

The smug expression that accompanied Fauci in his public appearances was supplanted by a trembling stare. Earlier in the week, Fauci’s diary was released to the public, having inexplicably been found on a federal government server.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., chairman of the committee, said at the hearing that the contents of the diary did not align with Fauci’s previous congressional testimony or his public direction to the American people regarding gain-of-function research funding, the efficacy of masks, the likelihood of a Wuhan lab leak causing the outbreak, and more. The “revelatory cringe” of the diary further revealed Fauci’s humiliating hubris while the nation was locked down, loved ones died alone, kids “learned” from home, people lost their careers, and businesses shuttered during the Covid-19 outbreak.

Ultimately, we learned nothing new at the hearing. But what persists is whether Fauci’s invocation of the Fifth Amendment was proper, especially given his pardon from President Biden. Fauci’s pardon reads:

FOR ANY OFFENSES against the United States which he may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014, through the date of this pardon arising from or in any manner related to his service as Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases [NIAID], as a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force or the White House COVID-19 Response Team, or as Chief Medical Advisor to the President.

This pardon covers all federal crimes related to his government service that may have been committed between January 1, 2014, and January 19, 2025 — the date of the auto-penned signature.  This 11-year period spans nearly all federal statutes of limitations, to include false testimony to Congress (five years). So, was the Fauci Fifth contempt of Congress?

Legal Precedent

In Mason v. United States, the Supreme Court made it clear that pleading the Fifth is “confined to instances where the witness has reasonable cause to apprehend danger from a direct answer.” In Brown v. Walker, the high court further resolves that “the danger to be apprehended must be real and appreciable … not a danger of an imaginary and unsubstantial character, having reference to some extraordinary and barely possible contingency, so improbable that no reasonable man would suffer it.”

With pardon in hand, is there a reasonable danger of federal prosecution for answering questions solely confined to his previous testimony?

The Supreme Court also cautions that self-incrimination refers to past activities only, not impending perjury or false statements resulting from the questions. Also, the Fauci Fifth is not legally appropriate just because truthful answers would “have the tendency to disgrace” him. In other words, even if Fauci’s answers might be embarrassing, he still must answer.

There are myriad testimonial situations where the Fifth Amendment cannot be blanketly asserted. Amnesty, testimonial immunity, statutory immunity, constitutional immunity, expiration of the statute of limitations, double jeopardy, waiver, and, of course, a pardon may prevent an otherwise legitimate invocation of the Fifth Amendment. A person may waive his right against self-incrimination by answering some questions or making denial statements, and then invoking the Fifth for others.

Relevant here is that in Fauci’s opening statement he mentioned his “decades-long cooperation with Congress” before invoking the Fifth Amendment, which is an oblique defense of his previous testimony. Courts have held that such an invocation may have waived or forfeited Fauci’s right to assert the Fifth Amendment altogether.

Several senators asked questions related to Fauci’s former testimony regarding Covid origins, the lab leak theory, masking, school closures, and funding gain-of-function research. Sen. Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio, had more poignant questions.

All repeatedly directed Fauci to answer those questions, to which Fauci repeatedly invoked the Fifth. He was even asked mundane questions about the color of his necktie or the color of the carpet. Same invocation. Same refusal. It was in these moments that the Fauci Fifth may not be worth the paper his lawyers printed it on.

There appears to be no feasible state or local prosecution that could result from alleged previous false testimony before Congress. Only federal law would apply to that false testimony or perjury. Regardless of the promises or strongly worded letters from state attorneys general, there is no possible legal contingency that is not entirely imaginary for state or local prosecution to bring a case against Fauci for false testimony before Congress.

Therefore, and because of Fauci’s pardon for those activities, he had a legal obligation to answer those questions covering his activities at NIAID during the covered pardon period. When Fauci refused, this could constitute criminal contempt. We saw former Trump administration officials prosecuted successfully under the same legal theory during the Biden administration.

Abandoning His Pardon?

Moreover, when asked several questions about activities isolated to his pardon period, did Fauci abandon his pardon altogether by asserting the Fifth? The Supreme Court in Wilson v. United States opined there is no authority for any person or body to force the acceptance of a pardon by anyone but the recipient, and it must be affirmatively asserted.

The Supreme Court case of Burdick v. United States had very similar facts to Fauci’s predicament. There, George Burdick was an editor at the New York Tribune. He was issued a pardon by President Woodrow Wilson for any federal offenses he may have committed in connection with the publication of an article regarding alleged fraud. Burdick had not been charged with a crime and no criminal investigation into Burdick had begun.

Despite the preemptive pardon, Burdick refused to testify before a grand jury, instead asserting his Fifth Amendment right not to provide testimony that would tend to incriminate him. Burdick never affirmatively asserted or declared his pardon. The Supreme Court concluded that “it was Burdick’s right to refuse [the pardon]” and stand on his Fifth Amendment objection. In other words, if you plead the Fifth, you abandon or otherwise refuse your pardon.

If Fauci refused or abandoned his pardon by invoking his right against self-incrimination, then activities covered in the pardon period may again be ripe for prosecution. His diary will be Exhibit A. The legal reality is that Fauci cannot have both the prophylaxis of a pardon and the Fifth Amendment for questioning specifically related to his prior congressional testimony during the covered period.

Fauci chose to avoid self-incrimination, desperate to avoid answering questions about his former congressional testimony as juxtaposed with recently declassified materials, discovered emails, and of course his diary entries. By choosing the Fifth, Fauci may have abandoned his pardon and opened himself to criminal prosecution for any crimes (e.g. false statements to Congress) made during the pardon period.

Conversely, if Fauci argues such activities were covered by the pardon and he is immune from prosecution for those activities, then Fauci may be properly charged for criminal contempt of Congress because he improperly plead the Fifth.

Sen. Paul has promised a criminal referral to DOJ as early as this week. The Justice Department will have to examine these narrow legal concepts and determine if charges should be brought.

The irony is that if Fauci had testified truthfully last week, even if that meant admitting he previously gave false testimony before Congress in the covered pardon period or lied to the American people, he would be facing no legal consequences. Having asserted the Fauci Fifth 111 times under oath in the U.S. Senate on national television, Fauci’s legacy instead is forever the painful perception of a mendacious “megalomaniac,” starved for fame, and dripping in self-interest.

https://thefederalist.com/2026/08/04/why-faucis-refusal-to-answer-congress-puts-his-pardon-in-jeopardy/

You Simply Cannot Give Power to Lunatics

 From Ceuta to Cuba to Tehran — and increasingly the American left — the same destructive ideas keep proving that reality is no match for ideological zeal.

I’m looking around the world right now, and what I see isn’t all bad. In fact, there are lots of indications of positive things happening or about to happen. What strikes me, though, in seeing the hopeful signs, is the contrast between those and the, er… other things going on in the world.

For example, the Moorish invasion of the Spanish town of Ceuta.

Much of the reporting, particularly on social media, that you’ve seen is overhyped and factually shaky. There was indeed a massive wave of migrants from Morocco into that North African town, which briefly doubled its population of 85,000. The migrants were almost exclusively male; most were Moroccans — unemployment in Morocco is as high as 29 percent in some parts of the country — and the remainder seems to be largely sub-Saharan Africans. That wave generated some utterly appalling video, to be sure, though the accusations made against the Spanish government, namely that it invited the wave and seeks to profit politically by it, appear not to be accurate. (RELATED: I’m a Spanish Taxpayer. This Is Why the West Doesn’t Need to Reward Illegal Immigrants.)

Pedro Sánchez, the socialist president of that country, actually sent in the army to repel that invasion, and as of Monday it seems that all but 3,000-5,000 of the migrants had been returned to Morocco. None have made it across the Strait of Gibraltar to the Iberian mainland.

But it’s fairly obvious that the human-trafficking cartels which control African migration — whether North African or sub-Saharan African — into Europe were simply testing the Spanish government’s resolve and capabilities, and with the better part of 100,000 people conducting a human wave into a small territory on a compressed timeline one can’t help but to see Ceuta as a textbook example of what happens when the bad guys go unchecked.

Sánchez’s government is not in the business of checking bad guys. He’s been Spain’s president since 2018, and he’s all but wrecked the country with terrible economic policies, catastrophic immigration policies and rampant corruption. In truth, those migrants were almost certainly attempting to enter Spain as a way station to someplace better in Europe. (RELATED: What’s Wrong With Spain? It’s Pedro Sánchez.)

Is that the U.K.? Some 2,000 illegal aliens have entered Great Britain through the English Channel since its new prime minister, Andy Burnham, was anointed to replace Keir Starmer as the captain of the sinking ship which is the Labour government, and the citizenry seems to be angrier than ever before. Burnham’s chief  political opponent, Nigel Farage of the Reform UK Party, has come out publicly for employing the Royal Navy to blockade the English Channel and prevent crossings by migrants in small boats and rubber rafts, which has generated howls of opposition from the French, who have allowed their country to become the leading repository for African migrants. (RELATED: Five Quick Things: Henry Nowak, the Inevitable British Civil War, and What It Means for Us) 

The old line that you can vote yourself into socialism but you’ve got to shoot your way out is very relevant here.

The current governing class in Western Europe seems to be unanimous in its approach to migration by non-Westerners into their countries — namely, that they want as much of it as they can hide from the public, and any resistance to that wave they’ll put up is mostly performative and never long-lasting.

Nobody really thinks the Moroccans turned back at Ceuta won’t eventually make it into Europe. It’s only a matter of time.

And so the lands of Ferdinand and Isabella, and of Charles Martel, are gradually being gobbled up by the modern-day Moors, with little real prospect of a Reconquista on the horizon.

One may come, but before it does there will need to be a wave of political revolution, and perhaps bloody revolution, throughout Western Europe.

The old line that you can vote yourself into socialism but you’ve got to shoot your way out is very relevant here. Allow these people political power, and they will eat away at your democratic and cultural institutions until there is nothing left but the corruption they’ve installed, and those institutions collapse into themselves. And you’ll have to build new institutions to replace them. 

Which is what you get when you allow the lunatics into power.

The serialization of my new novel The Necessary Men will begin here at The American Spectator in just more than a week, as I’ve noted, and in writing it I did more research into Cuba’s maladministration under the communist revolutionary tyranny which controls that country than I would have cared to. The only conclusion anyone can come to in surveying the 67 years since Fidel Castro and his cronies seized power there is that the Cuban revolutionaries are lunatics.

Crafty lunatics, who, as the State Department’s report on Cuban communism made clear, are far more dangerous and have been for a long time. That’s certain. But lunatics all the same. (RELATED: The Castroist Playbook Comes to America)

To get a good glimpse of what they’ve made of that country, I’ll direct you to a YouTuber who goes by Adventure Elliot; he’s from Wisconsin but actually lives in Spain, and earlier this year he traversed Cuba to produce 12 travelog videos exposing what the Castroites have done to the place.

They’ve turned it into a madhouse. Neighbor turns on neighbor. Every foreigner is mobbed and scammed. People live in filth, conditioned to accept what the revolution gives them — which is misery. Initiative is punished, and the supposed classless society now manifests itself in two tiers of people — those with relatives in the United States or elsewhere who remit money to them to pay for basic necessities in what private shops the communists allow, and those without who stand in line at the state stores.

As everyone’s house falls down around them.

Use Google Earth’s satellite view to navigate around Cuba, and you will see things which make no sense — there are literal ruins in every town on the island, buildings which collapsed from years of neglect and have just been left to molder. People raid those sites for bricks or other building materials; in some cases, the inhabitants of those collapsed houses remain in what shelter they can find.

And in less than five years, Cuba’s population has declined from 11 million to less than nine and a half million. Just as Venezuela, Cuba’s protege communist paradise, ran off a quarter of its own population in a decade. 

To live like that is lunacy. Cuba won’t for very much longer; it can’t.

And yet the lunatics are somehow not discredited.

We’re watching the Democrat Party come apart at the seams. As David Catron noted on Monday, James Carville says he won’t be in the same party as Hasan Piker, and that’s a noble sentiment, but it’s too late. Polling indicates the Democrats can’t stop Francesca Hong, a committed — well, in one sense; in another she’s uncommitted, and this is a problem — lunatic running for governor of that state whose Twitter/X feed contains some of the most insane, hateful drivel imaginable. Just recently, Hong dropped a post on X which accused the patrons of the Wisconsin staple Culver’s Restaurants of genocidal racism based on her own feelings and perceptions without any concrete substance to them, which generated national buzz, and yet the Democrat voters of that state don’t seem to be coming off her. She’s going to win her primary unless something massive changes. (RELATED: Why Republicans May Defy Midterm History)

And Piker just descended on Wisconsin to stump for her. Which doesn’t appear to be a scandal among the party’s voters. (RELATED: The New Brownshirts?)

Piker is also stumping for Abdul El-Sayed, who is now as much as a 15-point favorite over the more establishmentarian Heather Stevens in the Michigan Senate race. El-Sayed comes from an accomplished academic background and has apparently made a lot of money based on the properties he and his wife own, but we don’t know how he managed it. He’s an avowed DSA socialist whose speeches and pronouncements contain open rejections of the American founding and way of life, and it doesn’t seem to bother Michigan Democrat voters in the least.

Because Michigan Democrats, like Wisconsin Democrats, are now made up of a majority of lunatics who think that abandoning American culture, economics, and  politics and putting people like Francesca Hong and Abdul El-Sayed, not to mention Darieliza Avila Chevalier and Zohran Mamdani, in positions of power will create something better.

And we see something else, which defines it as lunacy — namely, an utter refusal to recognize that these things do not work.

This isn’t stupidity. It’s lunacy. It’s pathological, because we already see, in the decline in Western Europe and the destruction in Cuba, what those belief systems create. 

And we see something else, which defines it as lunacy — namely, an utter refusal to recognize that these things do not work.

That’s a problem. Dealing with lunatics whose worldviews are impervious to their own failures leads to intractable dilemmas. A perfect case of this involves the lunatics in charge of Iran. (RELATED: When the Villagers Finally Have Had Enough of the Pillagers)

It’s been five months since the current round of bombing started, and basically all of America is tired of the Iranian conflict, the off-and-on blockage of the Strait of Hormuz, the higher gasoline prices that blockage has fostered, and the intermittent reports of American casualties. President Trump is without a doubt looking for a suitable off-ramp from the conflict for domestic  political reasons.

But the truth is that beyond the perception of this five-month staccato of air strikes and negotiations,  there is indeed a forever war. It isn’t ours; it’s Iran’s. Since 1979, that regime has done everything it could to plunge itself into open conflict with the world’s largest superpower because the people in charge of Iran since their revolution believe that if they can start enough trouble, a 1,200-year-old man will climb up out of a well and perfect the planet.

That’s lunacy. Those are lunatics. And Trump and his team, who keep going back to the table again and again after beating on the lunatics, destroying their military infrastructure, taking apart their capabilities to make war and affect the geostrategic situation, and yet nonetheless offering them an offramp to their own inevitable demise, are finding that you can’t negotiate with lunatics because their math is not the same as yours.

Iran doesn’t want peace with us. Iran wants to destroy us. If we’re going to have peace with Iran, we’re going to need a different Iran.

Just like we’re going to need a different Cuba.

And just like there will have to be a different Western Europe if the continent is going to save itself from the demographic time bomb ticking ever more loudly as it packs migrant on top of migrant to weigh down an already sclerotic society. (RELATED: Spain’s Demographic Suicide: A Generational Error Europe Will Not Undo)

And just like we will eventually come back to a reality this country once embraced, which is that there can be no bread broken or accord made with the Francesca Hongs and Zohran Mamdanis.

You have to deny power to the lunatics. This is neither negotiable nor avoidable. It’s a lesson we seem doomed to repeat the hard way, and we will invariably learn it again soon.

https://spectator.org/you-simply-cannot-give-power-to-lunatics/

https://spectator.org/china-makes-panama-pay-for-saying-no/