Covid Tyrants Were Perpetrators, Not Victims
The Covid 'experts' chose the unscientific tyranny of lockdowns, mandates, and petty, ineffective, legalistic rules, and they didn’t have to.The Covid 'experts' chose the unscientific tyranny of lockdowns, mandates, and petty, ineffective, legalistic rules, and they didn’t have to.Is Fauci pardon legitimate? Autopen signatures cast doubt on legality of Biden docs.
Anthony Fauci, retired Gen. Mark Milley, and others with questionable track records received controversial pardons just prior to Joe Biden leaving office.
New signature analysis conducted by the Heritage Foundation's Oversight Project indicates that the "same exact Biden autopen signature" appeared on each of these pardons.
This revelation regarding the use of an automatic signature device, coupled with evidence of Biden's diminished agency while in office and previous allegations concerning his sidelining, has prompted some critics to wonder who was actually dispensing pardons as well as about the validity of the controversial pardons.
Contrary to CNN's assertion last year that the use of the autopen was "a rarity in the Biden administration," the Oversight Project reported Thursday that nearly every executive order, pardon, and other consequential document researchers could find from Biden's presidency bore a machine-generated signature.
While other presidents, including Donald Trump and Barack Obama, have used the so-called autopen, there are indications that document signings during Biden's tenure were repeatedly undertaken while he was absent — not only in body but possibly also in mind.
The Oversight Project indicated that in one instance, Biden's oft-used autopen signature appeared on the pardons for a murderer and five other criminals that were issued while the then-president was vacationing and golfing in the U.S. Virgin Islands. The pardons all reportedly indicated that they were signed "at the City of Washington."
'The autopen findings could open up legal challenges.'
The White House acknowledged that the Federal Aviation Administration funding extension was signed in May 2024 using an autopen. It was suggested that Biden, traveling in San Francisco at the time, had sought to avoid a lapse in funding and was cognizant of this taking place.
Biden has, however, cast doubt on whether he was always in the loop when documents were being signed in his name.
The former president allegedly told House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) that he did not remember signing a January 2024 order to pause decisions on exports of liquefied natural gas. This suggestion fueled suspicions that one or more individuals in Biden's orbit had usurped presidential powers.
"The main legal question here is who was the president over the last four years," Oversight Project Executive Director Mike Howell previously told Blaze News. "That's what we are aiming to uncover. The prolific use of autopen by the Biden White House was an instrument to hide the truth from the American people as to who was running the government."
The Oversight Project emphasized on X that "WHOEVER CONTROLLED THE AUTOPEN CONTROLLED THE PRESIDENCY."
On Jan. 20, just hours before leaving the Oval Office, Biden allegedly issued a number of pardons, citing the need to protect the recipients from potential "revenge" by the incoming Trump administration.
Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff whom Trump has accused of committing "treason," nabbed a pardon, as did several members of Biden's family who were apparently involved in sleazy foreign deals with the former president and his felonious son Hunter Biden; Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, California Sen. Adam Schiff (D), and other members of the Jan. 6 committee; D.C. Metro Police officers who testified before the Jan. 6 committee; and Gerald Lundergan, the former head of the Kentucky state Democratic Party who served as state chair for Hillary Clinton's failed 2008 presidential campaign and was convicted in 2019 of making illegal campaign contributions.
'It appears staffers and officers in the Biden administration may have exploited Biden's incapacity.'
Fauci, the fifth director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, also among the pardonees, received a "full and unconditional" pass for possible federal crimes going back to Jan. 1, 2014 — around the time the Obama administration supposedly halted funding for dangerous gain-of-function research.
Despite the pardon, a coalition of state attorneys general indicated last month that they still want to hold Fauci accountable for "alleged mismanagement, misleading statements, and suppression of scientific debate."
Fauci, like the others, might be more exposed than the state attorneys general may have originally thought.
After demonstrating that the signature on the pardons was identical, the Oversight Projected noted, "The autopen findings could open up legal challenges to the validity of Biden's pardons in a court of law. The U.S. Constitution requires a president be 'present' for all legal signatures."
The Oversight Project indicated that with the exception of the Democrat's announcement indicating that he was dropping out of the 2024 race, every document researchers could find bearing Biden's signature "used the same autopen signature."
Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) said of the watchdog group's finding, "On the plus side, we can say we lived under America's first robot president."
Howell posed the question, "What should happen to these 'pardons'?" then indicated with a brief video that they should be torn up.
President Trump's U.S. envoy for special missions, Richard Grenell, stated, "Biden didn't sign the pardons."
Blaze News previously reported that Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey has called on the Department of Justice to launch a full investigation into the legality of Biden's presidential actions in light of his apparent mental decline.
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"Under the 25th Amendment, his inability to make decisions should have meant a succession of power," Bailey noted in his letter. "Instead, it appears staffers and officers in the Biden administration may have exploited Biden's incapacity so they could issue orders without an accountable President of sound mind approving them."
"It is black-letter law that a document is void, ab initio, when the person signing it lacks mental capacity," added Bailey.
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Cleaning up Biden’s bird flu mess falls to Trump
The Biden administration’s brilliant plan to address avian flu involved using a non-sterilizing, leaky vaccine on chickens — two years into the pandemic, when most live chickens have already been exposed to the virus. Where have we heard that idea before, and how did it end again?
Over the past four years, I’ve examined numerous studies and firsthand accounts showing how imperfect vaccines, notably the COVID shots, can lead to negative efficacy. The problem with a leaky vaccine is that it allows the most resilient mutations to thrive and become dominant strains. This doesn’t mean the vaccines cause these mutations, but they do foster natural selection that favors the worst variants.
This administration urgently needs to signal a shift away from Biden’s disastrous biosecurity policies, especially concerning avian flu.
The mass vaccination of chickens against Marek’s disease in the 1970s is a stark example of this problem. The use of a leaky vaccine in that case led to the emergence of more virulent strains, making the disease far deadlier for unvaccinated chickens.
As Quanta magazine warned in 2018:
The problem with leaky vaccines, Read says, is that they enable pathogens to replicate unchecked while also protecting hosts from illness and death, thereby removing the costs associated with increased virulence. Over time, then, in a world of leaky vaccinations, a pathogen might evolve to become deadlier to unvaccinated hosts because it can reap the benefits of virulence without the costs — much as Marek’s disease has slowly become more lethal to unvaccinated chickens. This virulence can also cause the vaccine to start failing by causing illness in vaccinated hosts.
History not only repeats itself but also rhymes. Last weekend, South Dakota-based veterinary biologics company Medgene announced that the USDA was nearing conditional approval for its H5N1 vaccine for dairy cattle. What happens if this vaccine spreads to the animal kingdom and eventually reaches humans?
The risks of non-sterilizing, leaky vaccines are well documented. Despite the disastrous outcomes linked to the COVID vaccines, the government has not paused its push for respiratory viral vaccines. Instead, it is actively promoting the new RSV shots, ignoring the potential dangers.
Even Anthony Fauci acknowledged these risks in a 2023 academic paper, co-authored with David Morens, then a senior scientific adviser at NIAID. The paper, published in the journal Cell in January 2023, admitted that flu-like vaccines are non-sterilizing and have significant shortcomings.
“Deficiencies in these vaccines reminiscent of influenza vaccines have become apparent,” Fauci conceded, adding that “they elicit incomplete and short-lived protection.” This admission underscores the need for a more cautious approach to vaccine approval and distribution.
Why are we still allowing the flu vaccine to continue, and why are we even calling it a vaccine? Flu shots do not sterilize the virus. In fact, Fauci expressed concerns about “disease tolerance” and “immune tolerance,” which result from “immune defense mechanisms that allow hosts to ‘accept’ infection and other antigenic stimuli to optimize survival.”
In other words, leaky, waning vaccines that rely on suboptimal antibodies against rapidly mutating viruses can lead to immune tolerance and imprinting. This can cause the immune system to misfire, resulting in negative efficacy. Any short-term protection against severe disease often comes at a long-term cost as the viruses adapt and grow stronger.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, countries like Australia and New Zealand saw almost no fatalities in 2020, before vaccines were introduced. However, deaths surged only after vaccination campaigns began. Renowned cardiologist and epidemiologist Dr. Peter McCullough warns that we may be repeating the same mistakes with avian flu vaccines.
“Remember, when we have bird flu, it’s always a mixture of strains, not a single strain,” McCullough said on my podcast last week. “It’s going to nudge the overall population to more virulent strains. The southeast Asians have now been vaccinating poultry for several decades, and there’s tons of information that it’s backfiring.”
What’s worse is that human vaccines are also in the works. “We’re even more concerned about the human bird flu vaccines,” McCullough said. “We have a CSL Seqirus vaccine that was FDA-cleared in 2021. It's an antigen-based vaccine; in the randomized trials of normal human volunteers, they died with this vaccine. So it frankly looks dangerous from the onset.”
Fortunately, this vaccine was not made commercially available. But why should we think that future efforts would succeed when we have failed to concoct safe and effective respiratory viral vaccines?
This administration urgently needs to signal a shift away from Biden’s disastrous biosecurity policies, especially concerning avian flu. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed last week, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins outlined a five-part plan with $1 billion in subsidies but did not suggest pausing the vaccination campaign or halting the harmful culling of chickens.
She might be reconsidering. This week, Rollins acknowledged that “not enough research has been done” and emphasized the need to ensure that a vaccine would help contain the virus rather than strengthen it or cause it to spread to other species.
Now it’s up to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to scrap this plan entirely. RFK was made for a moment like this. His first major test began the moment he took office, and the clock is ticking.
DHS report provides another damning insight into how FEMA wasted billions of dollars
The Federal Emergency Management Agency is tasked with coordinating disaster responses.
It's become clear in recent months that behind the scenes, the agency is something of a disaster itself — prioritizing "equity" as its top strategic goal; blowing hundreds of millions of dollars on an emergency food and shelter program for illegal aliens while American citizens struggled; allegedly giving tens of millions of dollars to luxury hotels to house illegal aliens; reportedly denying aid to Americans on the basis of political affiliation; and bungling disaster relief.
A recent report from the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General revealed that the agency's mismanagement of funds and resources under Biden-nominated FEMA administrator Deanne Criswell is possibly worse than previously imagined.
According to DHS Inspector General Joseph Cuffari — not among the IGs that President Donald Trump has so far chosen to fire — FEMA mismanaged nearly $10 billion in COVID-19 emergency protective measures grants during fiscal years 2020 through 2023.
The Jan. 30 report indicated the waste at FEMA was the result in part of the agency "not following established requirements when delivering Public Assistance funding." When it came to a medical staffing grant, for example, "FEMA did not validate the reasonableness of cost estimates provided by the state before obligating funds."
FEMA must assess the reasonableness of the estimated costs by reviewing historical documentation, using average area costs, or relying on published cost-estimated services. The report claimed, however, that during the pandemic, the agency didn't bother with proper validation and relied instead on "one sheet of paper with no itemized costs" that "was not prepared by a licensed Professional Engineer or cost-estimated professional" when approving a grant valued at over $1.1 billion.
'FEMA does not have the funds to make it through the season.'
"FEMA's inadequate validation of pre-award costs for the state's medical staffing project contributed to $1.5 billion in funds that could have been put to better use," said the report. "Had the $1.5 billion not been over-obligated to this project, it could have been transferred to the Disaster Relief Fund and made available to provide funding for other disasters."
The inspector general noted further that the agency also didn't bother validating the costs submitted for reimbursement on completed projects before shoveling over taxpayer money.
Analysts with the IG's office apparently selected a random sample of 20 large projects totaling $58 million "from a universe of 8,420 projects ranging from $131,100 through $100 and reviewed pre-award controls." They ultimately found that six of the 20 completed projects, totaling roughly $33 million, lacked the required documentation to validate "completion of the work and actual costs incurred before project award and reimbursement."
FEMA officials were evidently throwing around money without proper confirmation of whether the services were being rendered to eligible participants, whether the jobs were actually getting done, and who if anybody was doing them.
The agency's apparent difficulty properly vetting funding to a single state, which the OIG did not name in the report, led to $8.1 billion of spending that the inspector general is now questioning.
Former Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas complained on Sept. 30 that "FEMA does not have the funds to make it through the season and what is imminent."
It appears that haphazard project approvals and other forms of mismanagement emptied the agency's coffers and put Americans in danger.
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Damning new episode of BlazeTV's 'The Coverup' blows lid off Biden's 10-year pardon for Fauci
In an 11th-hour move as he prepared to leave office, former President Joe Biden granted Dr. Anthony Fauci a sweeping pardon covering any potential offenses dating back to 2014 — the same year the United States' ban on "gain-of-function" research took effect.
In the latest episode of BlazeTV's "The Coverup," Matt Kibbe and Dr. Richard Ebright expose the smoking gun behind Biden's unprecedented pardon.
Ebright explained how Fauci leveraged the 2001 anthrax attacks to rise to power. Fauci's willingness to effectively become the nation's "biodefense research czar" resulted in him becoming the highest-paid government employee.
'Fauci's response has been to double down and say he did the right thing.'
"9/11 and the anthrax mailings provided an opportunity, provided an opening, provided a pretext to support a number of activities, and one of those activities was the expansion of biodefense efforts and the redirection of those efforts away from countermeasures and towards research on the biological weapons agents themselves," Ebright told Kibbe.
He explained that former Vice President Dick Cheney sought an agency to conduct such research that did not have — and would not implement — a biological weapons convention compliance office. Cheney's solution was the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Ebright expressed concern about another "deliberate release or, inadvertently, an accidental release." He noted that in 2002, it had become clear that the anthrax mailings were a deliberate attack committed by a worker at a biodefense research laboratory.
"Ironically, the response to that attack from within — a response that began almost seven months before the source had been identified — was to increase the number of institutions ... and the number of individuals ... who had hands-on access to fully infectious biological weapons agents and to do that with no material increase in oversight in safety and security," Ebright said.
Ebright highlighted several harmful biological weapons research projects — including the recreation of the 1918 pandemic influenza virus and the reconstruction of the avian flu for human transmission — which he referred to as Fauci's "embarrassments."
He noted that the research was carried out without first conducting risk assessments.
"Each time, Fauci's response has been to double down and say he did the right thing. 'This is a risk, but I have reviewed this risk, and I, Dr. Fauci, have determined on behalf of 7.9 billion members of the global public that this a risk worth taking,'" Ebright stated.
Ebright accused Fauci of "repeatedly and flagrantly" violating U.S. policies and then lying in congressional testimony.
Fauci "participated in a conspiracy to defraud the public about the origin [of the COVID-19 virus] in a conspiracy to cover up the origin."
Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) stated that he has referred Fauci to the Department of Justice for prosecution three times after he apparently lied to Congress in 2021, claiming that the NIH never funded gain-of-function research.
"We've detailed his lies to Congress, which are a felony. I've sort of tragically and jokingly said, 'If he were a member of the Trump administration, he would have been arrested long ago.' Because I think we have two standards of justice," Paul told Kibbe. "He certainly seems to be protected."
"The reason the Democrats, I think, coalesced around him is that he represents government, and they think government is the answer to most things," Paul continued. "Any attack on him is an attack on central planning or an attack on government."
Dr. Scott Atlas, one of President Trump's health advisers during his first administration, stated that Fauci, former White House coronavirus task force coordinator Deborah Birx, and former Centers for Disease Control Director Robert Redfield "presided over the worst fiasco in public health history."
"They destroyed — hopefully not irreparably — a younger generation, creating hysteria, massive psychological harms on teenagers and college students, suicidal ideation, cigarettes being put out on their skin, self-harm, a massive spike in anxiety and depression. These are all from the lockdown, not the virus. And an obesity crisis where more than over half of college-age Americans had an average weight gain during 2020 of 28 pounds," he stated. "They did that. They caused that. And the third massive problem with their legacy, they destroyed trust in public health and science."
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Coalition of state AGs seek to bypass Biden pardon and hold Fauci accountable
Just hours before leaving office, former President Joe Biden issued a pardon for Anthony Fauci, giving the fifth director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases a pass for possible federal crimes going back to Jan. 1, 2014 — around the time the Obama administration supposedly halted funding for dangerous gain-of-function research.
While Biden's stated intention was to spare the 84-year-old immunologist from "being investigated or prosecuted," the geriatric Democrat could not ultimately spare Fauci from being held accountable for possible violations of state laws.
South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson and 16 other state attorneys general have launched an investigation into Fauci's role in the COVID-19 pandemic response, "demanding accountability for alleged mismanagement, misleading statements, and suppression of scientific debate."
After referencing damning findings by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic concerning Fauci, the attorneys general urged House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) in a letter Wednesday to "consider using all available tools" at Congress' disposal to "ensure that former President Biden's shameful pardon does not frustrate accountability."
The state attorneys general evidently have one particular "tool" in mind.
Underscoring that Biden's pardon does not "preclude state-level investigations or legal proceedings," they noted that members of Congress can refer pertinent findings to state officials who "possess the authority to address violations of state law or breaches of public trust."
'We are fully prepared to take appropriate action to ensure justice is served.'
"You are uniquely positioned to assist us by providing us with information that could outline potential courses of action under state law, should they exist," said the letter. "If possible, please furnish us with the necessary details so that we may make informed decisions aimed at holding malign actors accountable."
The congressional report cited in the letter found that:
- Fauci got the ball rolling on the controversial paper "The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2" with the apparent aim of discrediting the lab leak theory, which is now widely regarded as the most likely explanation. Fauci may have wanted to push the zoonotic origin theory, not only to avoid blaming China for the pandemic but because his fingerprints were all over the alternative origin. After all, EcoHealth Alliance, whose subcontractor Ben Hu — the Wuhan Institute of Virology's lead on gain-of-function research on coronaviruses — was among the pandemic's suspected patients zero, used NIAID funding to collaborate with the Wuhan lab.
- Fauci "played semantics with the definition of gain-of-function research" in an apparent effort to deceive federal lawmakers while testifying under oath. The report indicated that whereas Fauci stated on multiple occasions that the National Institutes of Health and NIAID had not funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab, his "testimony was, at a minimum, misleading" as such research had been funded through EcoHealth Alliance.
- The NIAID under Fauci "fostered an environment that promoted evading the Freedom of Information Act."
- The NIAID failed to adequately oversee EcoHealth Alliance, with Fauci admitting that he signed off on grants without reviewing them.
The state attorneys general noted further that it is clear that Fauci also "led a deliberate campaign to stifle the voices of premier health scholars regarding the lack of adequate testing of vaccines" and engaged in a propaganda campaign that "contributed to serious vaccine injuries — and in some cases, death."
Federal lawmakers may soon get their hands on evidence of other possible causes for state action.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) announced on Jan. 27 that the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee subpoenaed 14 agencies in connection with the origins of COVID-19 and taxpayer-funded gain-of-function research.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) revealed the following day that he had "issued his first subpoena as chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations to the Department of Health and Human Services for records relating to COVID-19 vaccine safety data and communications about the COVID-19 pandemic, including a subset of Dr. Anthony Fauci's emails."
"President Biden's blanket pardon of Dr. Fauci is a shameful attempt to prevent accountability," Wilson said in a statement. "If any of these findings indicate violations of state laws, we are fully prepared to take appropriate action to ensure justice is served."
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American kids' worsening reading skills signal continued fallout from school closures
The National Assessment of Educational Progress — the largest continuing and nationally representative assessment of American students' knowledge and capability in math, reading, science, and writing — released its 2024 assessment, also called the "Nation's Report Card," on Wednesday. The results were bleak.
Last year, the average reading score for both fourth- and eighth-grade students nationwide was two points lower than in 2022 and five points lower than the score for 2019.
According to the NAEP report card that relies on an assessment of hundreds of thousands of kids, the 2024 reading scores for fourth-grade students were lower at four of the five selected percentiles — namely the 10th, 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles — compared to 2022 percentile scores. When it came to eighth-grade students, their grades were lower at the 10th, 25th, and 50th percentiles compared to scores in 2022.
Only 38% of eighth-grade students demonstrated "solid academic performance and competency over challenging subject matter." When factoring in grade eight students who also scored at a basic reading level, the number was 67%, which the Wall Street Journal indicated is the lowest share since testing began in 1992.
Chalkbeat noted that all of the kids who took the exam last year had some of their education impacted by the pandemic — a period during which students were kept out of classrooms at the urging of teachers' unions in what became the longest interruption in schooling since formal education became the norm.
The National Education Union, one of the guilty parties, called for all schools to be shut down in spring of 2020, even though the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had exempted them. The union's president, Becky Pringle, reportedly made over $500,000 while fighting to keep schools closed between September 2020 and August 2021.
Blaze News previously reported that American Federation of Teachers boss Randi Weingarten, also instrumental in keeping kids out of the classroom, called the first Trump administration's proposal to reopen in-person learning in 2020 "reckless" and "cruel." While the AFT resisted a return to working in schools, which had altogether received $190 billion in COVID-19 relief money, union affiliates joined in, staging sick-outs, which were in some cases illegal.
'This is a flock of dead birds in the coal mine.'
It was clear early on in the pandemic that the school closures were going to adversely impact generations of kids.
The University of Toronto released a report in July 2021 acknowledging that "available evidence shows that school closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic could have lasting effects on educational outcomes and widen achievement gaps."
German researchers determined in a 2021 study in the journal Frontiers in Psychology that student achievement was negatively impacted by school closures, especially among younger students and students from poor families.
In addition to derailing young Americans' academics, the school closures also prompted spikes in mental illness, suicide, obesity, and diminished immune systems.
"The news is not good," Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, said Tuesday. "Student achievement has not returned to pre-pandemic levels, reading scores continue to decline, and our lowest performing students are reading at historically low levels."
'This is clearly a reflection of the education bureaucracy continuing to focus on woke policies.'
Carr suggested that the decline in average reading ability could not "be blamed solely on the pandemic" but admitted that there has been a "widening achievement gap in this country, and it has worsened since the pandemic."
"Student joy for reading is declining. We know that teachers are not asking as much for essay responses to questions," Carr reportedly said when identifying other contributing factors, which included absenteeism. "Students are also reading on devices. They're not reading the kind of passages on devices that maybe you and I did years ago."
Martin West, vice chair of the NAEP governing board and a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, told Chalkbeat, "We have a larger-than-in-recent-memory share of American students who are failing to demonstrate even partial mastery of the types of skills educators have defined as important."
"That doesn't bode well for their futures or for our collective futures," said West.
"I don't know how many different ways you can say these results are bad, but they're bad," Dan Goldhaber, an education researcher at the American Institutes for Research, told the Washington Post. "I don't think this is the canary in the coal mine. This is a flock of dead birds in the coal mine."
Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.), the chairman of the House Education and Workforce Committee, said in a statement, "When we fail our children, we fail our nation's future. Today's NAEP scores continue the concerning trend of declining performance nationwide. This is clearly a reflection of the education bureaucracy continuing to focus on woke policies rather than helping students learn and grow."
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Matt Taibbi tells Tucker Carlson why Biden's pardon for Fauci could help bring curtain down on COVID cover-up
Investigative reporter Matt Taibbi and Tucker Carlson recently spoke at length about long-standing efforts by deep-staters to control information flows, apparent last-ditch attempts by elements of the previous administration to embroil the U.S. in a direct conflict with Russia, and the likelihood that President Donald Trump has been targeted for assassination on more occasions than have been publicly admitted.
While the conversation was wide-ranging, it largely centered on the question of what impact Trump's mass disclosures — particularly his planned declassification of government documents — might have, not only on his safety but regarding various matters left unresolved or swept under the rug over the past four years, including the COVID-19 pandemic and its possible manufacture.
Taibbi told Carlson that in this time of revelation and reopened investigations, former President Joe Biden's strategic blunder could ultimately prove to be what forces Anthony Fauci to spill the beans.
While Biden apparently sought to spare Fauci from accountability, Taibbi indicated that the former president's pardon of Fauci on the eve of Trump's inauguration actually painted a target on his back and deprived the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases of his key means of self-preservation.
"The thing is about these pardons — they're a mistake. If you want to know what's happening, they just made it a lot easier for us to find out," said Taibbi. "Once the pardon's delivered, the person can't plead the Fifth. If they're brought before a grand jury, they can't take the Fifth any more. If they're brought before a congressional committee, they can't invoke the right against self-incrimination."
'It's going to be like a turkey shoot.'
Citing the insights of past and current congressional investigators as well as criminal defense attorneys, Taibbi suggested that the consensus is that it is "illogical to give somebody a pardon if you're trying to cover up things" unless "there are very serious crimes involved."
In either case, the pardon serves as a giant "red flag."
When asked what possible crimes Fauci might have needed cover for, going all the way back to Jan. 1, 2014 — around the time the Obama administration supposedly halted funding for dangerous gain-of-function research that makes pathogens more deadly and/or more transmissible — Taibbi noted that "the one thing that comes to mind immediately is perjury."
"Lying under oath to the Congress. In particular, saying, you know, that we have never funded gain-of-[function] research, that we weren't doing it during this time period — even as there are other people in the government, like the deputy director of the NIH, saying, 'Yes we were,' or Ralph Baric, who was one of the scientists at UNC, saying, 'Yes, absolutely, that was gain-of-function,'" said Taibbi.
Fauci misled Congress by stating in May 2021 that the National Institutes of Health "has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology."
In addition to putting the former NIAID director back on the hot seat, Taibbi suggested that other people with fingerprints all over the pandemic, including Peter Daszak — the British zoologist who was formally debarred along with his scandal-plagued organization EcoHealth Alliance this month by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services — may similarly be trotted out to answer questions, including questions about documents that the Trump administration may release.
"There are documents that we know exist that we're going to get now with FBI communications between the bureau and a lot of these scientists dating back 10 years, and it's going to tell a very crazy story," said Taibbi. "There's a reason why Fauci's pardon is backdated to 2014, because that's the time period that they're going to have to start looking [at]."
The investigative reporter suggested that key questions to revisit with these scientists will be, "When did we start defying the ban on gain-of-function research? ... Why were we doing it? What connection did that have to the Wuhan thing? What kind of advanced notice did we get? What kind of lies were told about it? Who were responsible for those lies? What kind of information did we get about the inefficacy of the vaccine?"
"COVID is a gigantic rats' nest of stuff," continued Taibbi. "It's going to be like a turkey shoot, where every direction they look, they're going to find something revelatory."
The investigative reporter suggested that the Republican-controlled government could illuminate what authorities actually knew about what was going on at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where American tax dollars ended up courtesy of Fauci; whether there was advance warning that the pandemic was coming; and whether investigations into the possibility of a lab leak were suppressed "because of the connections to U.S. research."
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