The Ruthless Persecution of Anthony Fauci Is the Story of Our Time
INSIDE: Rand Paul ... Ron Johnson ... RFK Jr.
The Trump Retribution Feedback Loop
The targeting of Anthony Fauci stands as a textbook case of retribution by the Trump administration using, in tandem with Republicans on Capitol Hill, what has become a well-worn and ruthless feedback loop that has ensnared other former officials and targets of the president’s ire.
The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee voted this morning to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress for having invoked his 5th Amendment rights not to testify at last week’s witch hunt of a hearing.
At least two Senate committees are actively going after Fauci.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), chair of the Senate Homeland Security Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, revealed last night that he had obtained Fauci’s COVID-era phone from the Department of Health and Human Services, Fauci’s former government employer, which left Republicans salivating that they had another motherlode of fodder to stoke the fires against Fauci.
HHS has previously released Fauci’s diary to Congress, without having notified him. If you needed reminding, HHS is led by chronic Fauci critic Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who wrote the 2021 book “The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health.”
But all of that is clearly not enough piling on Fauci in the current environment.
Attorneys general in Florida, Louisiana, and West Virginia seized on the Fauci diary as a pretext to launch their own investigations of him. The three red-state AGs announced yesterday that they had subpoenaed Fauci for a wide range of records tied to grant money, awards and book deals, and other evidence of what they alleged was potential self-dealing by Fauci. It was primarily an opportunity to further smear Fauci by press release and jump on the bandwagon with Republicans in Washington.
This particular pattern of retribution is chillingly familiar: The Trump administration releases government documents (and diaries and phones) to Republican allies on the Hill who in turn often leak the information to the right-wing media apparatus. The resulting MAGA firestorm leads to GOP-run hearings on the Hill, which serve as opportunities to entrap witnesses and prompt criminal referrals to the Trump DOJ.
It was puzzling to see otherwise smart and respected people dumping on Fauci last week for taking the 5th when this pattern had just played out in the House with former Special Counsel Jack Smith less than a week before. House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan dragged Smith in to testify about his two historic investigations of Trump and then ginned up a bogus claim of perjury that he referred to the Justice Department for potential criminal prosecution. James Comey and John Brennan have had their turns in the grinder, too, under similar though not identical circumstances.
Fauci has the advantage of a preemptive pardon from President Biden, which should in theory at least shield him from Trump DOJ persecution for alleged acts that predate the pardon. But testifying in a perjury trap set by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), who chairs HSGAC, would have been post-pardon conduct and left him potentially exposed in the same way Smith is. Still, his refusal to testify sets him up for a potential contempt of Congress prosecution. No way out. Tails I win, heads you lose.
If you don’t see the broad pattern of persecution and the mechanics of the retribution feedback loop — and deeply cynical bad faith fueling it all — you can fall into precious arguments over the limits of 5th Amendment rights or the bounds of congressional power or other curiosities while entirely missing the forest for the trees.
We are witnessing a stunning abuse of power by the executive branch and a pliant legislative branch that they have together refined and systematized into a grinder that chews up and spits out Trump foes as a means of retribution and for the sheer spectacle of it. That is the real story here. Not the Wuhan lab or COVID policy or whatever other ostensible underlying issue is the pretext for feeding Trump foes into his vengeance machine.
Neutering the Watchdogs at DOJ
Within the Trump DOJ, the Office of Professional Responsibility and the Office of Inspector General have lost significant percentages of their staffs and seen investigations plummet under Trump II, Reuters reports.
Mass Deportation Watch
ICE has threatened to seek criminal witness tampering charges against the elected county sheriffs in Minneapolis and Chicago for refusing to hand over inmates.
Airlines are pushing back against ICE enforcement operations on airplanes and jet bridges.
DOJ cites the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity decision to shield DOJ official Aakash Singh from scrutiny in the Broadview 6 case.
The Destruction: EPA Edition
Remember the $20 billion in grants that EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin froze and tried to claw back in the early days of Trump II — with help from acting U.S. Attorney Ed Martin, who tried to turn it into a criminal case, prompting the resignation of a senior career prosecutor?
I know. It was a long time ago, and these things are hard to keep track of. Which is partly the point. The grant recipients have been in limbo ever since, forced in some cases to lay off workers because the EPA funds were not available, which is also part of the point.
After winning a preliminary injunction at the district court level in April 2025, the grant recipients have finally won on appeal to the full D.C. Circuit and will now be able to access the funds. The appeals court divided 6-4 in a convoluted per curiam decision that upheld the preliminary injunction.
The Corruption: WTF? Edition
Jennifer Mascott, a Trump appointee to the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals, continued to run the D.C. public relations firm she inherited from her late husband for at least six months after she was confirmed as a judge in October 2025, Politico reports.
Hoisted on His Own Petard
The BBC seems only too happy to use President Trump’s defamation suit against it to explore his finances — and Trump is now scrambling to avoid a court-ordered deadline of today to turn over details on his business empire to the broadcaster.
In a related move, Trump is seeking to amend his lawsuit — over how the broadcaster spliced together portions of his Jan. 6 speech on The Ellipse — to remove the language that put his finances in play in discovery in the first place.
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The Fauci persecution by the Senate is the newest "Epstein Files" deflection, taking press coverage away from Sen. Ron Wyden's release of the Senate Committee on Finance report on several major banks' collusion with Epstein in suppressing or ignoring clear signals of "human trafficking and money laundering", all the while clamoring for his "business".
Dr Fauci is but the latest person whose turn in the trump punishment barrel generates daily headlines, while the real crimes of Jeffery Epstein continue to fight for attention.
https://www.finance.senate.gov/ranking-members-news/wyden-releases-new-report-on-failure-of-wall-street-banks-to-blow-the-whistle-on-jeffrey-epsteins-sex-trafficking-and-money-laundering-schemes
It's all just distraction from Republican's absolute failure to do anything useful to help the American people in the past two years. They have just been bootlickers for a grifter who has now got us into a disastrous illegal war, and we have an election coming up; the last thing they want to talk about is Trump's corruption, the economy or Iran. Let's all focus on Fauci instead!