Bulwark Takes - Republicans Found Fauci’s Diaries. Where’s the Smoking Gun?

Episode Date: July 29, 2026

Jonathan Cohn takes on the Fauci hearing spectacle, where Rand Paul grilled the former NIH chief over newly obtained diaries—and Fauci pled the Fifth. Cohn joins MS NOW to separate legitimate oversight from what he calls a political show trial aimed at Trump-era vengeance.Visit https://Upwork.com right now and post your job for free.

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I 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 U.S. government,

in part because of decisions that Anthony Fauci made. He wanted to grill 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, 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, you know, Ron Johnson. who has his own conspiracy theories, he used the hearing to expound in those theories and to attack Fauci. Tommy Tuberville said he was going to go after Fauci, that in fact he was going to talk to people in Alabama and the state officials there, if there was some way to bring Fauci down to 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, as 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.

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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 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. Dr. Fauci, were the scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology capable of inserting a fur and cleavage site into a coronavirus? On the advice of counsel, I respectfully declined to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution. All right. Let's bring in MS now Capitol Hill reporter Kevin Fry. We also have a senior national correspondent at the bulwark, Jonathan Cohn, and former chief medical officer at the CDC, Dr. Deborah Howary. Jonathan, I want your take first on what we've heard from the lawmakers who've had the chance to ask.

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 asked because Dr. Vin Gupta was on with my colleagues, 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 and from fiction and from drama. Yeah. So, I mean, look, there are a few questions that are legitimate. And, you know, 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 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 in the country? It's Donald Trump deeply invested in taking out vengeance on Fauci, who he thinks helped ruin his first term. 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 on him and put him in jail.

Jonathan, what would you say to people who are picking apart the sections that have to do with his own reflections on his fame, the celebrities that he called to answer questions for them during the pandemic, a lot of hay being made from that piece? Do you see that as sort of wholly separate from the question of the science, and the actual public health realities that we lived with are living with now? Or do you think there are real challenges there? I think my takeaway is that Anthony Fauci's a human being. You know, he's in the middle of this storm, all this chaos going on,

and he's like, wow, I got to meet Julia Roberts. Well, you know what? If I got to meet Julia Roberts and talk to her, I'd say wow, too. She's Julia Roberts. But, you know, the main takeaway from all these diaries is that he was deeply serious, invested, trying to figure out the science. And what Dr. Howie was just describing, I feel like people forget. It was chaos for the first few months.

Nobody knew how to deal with this. It was overload on all systems, healthcare providers at the level of government. Everybody was trying to figure out what was going on. Fauci was doing his best. He made some mistakes like everybody did. But he was trying to follow the science, trying to do the best job possible. And don't forget, in an administration, where the president of the United States was a chief source of misinformation, chaos, and trying desperately to deny the problem

purely because he thought it might hurt his chances for re-election. Jonathan Cohn, Kevin Fry, and Dr. Deborah Howary. Good to see all of you, and thank you.