Republicans claim the 1,000-page document dump proves the former medical adviser frequently harbored private thoughts about his breakfast.
Former chief White House medical adviser Anthony Fauci faces a hostile Senate panel this Wednesday, following Sen. Rand Paul’s publication of more than 1,000 pages of Fauci's private diaries which Republicans claim demonstrate the infectious disease expert was occasionally "just in a weird mood." The sweeping document dump, obtained after a years-long legal battle, spans the earliest days of the COVID-19 pandemic and features extensive, daily documentation of Fauci’s internal state.
Paul, who has long sparred with Fauci over the origins of the virus, announced in a Monday press conference that the diaries provide the missing link in a global cover-up, pointing specifically to a heavily underlined passage from May 2020 where Fauci wrote that he "just didn't want to deal with anyone right now." According to committee filings, Republican investigators plan to dedicate a substantial portion of the hearing to interrogating a damning April 12 entry in which the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases confessed to feeling "sort of blah today," a sentiment Paul argued was a coded directive to silence whistleblowers.
For three years, Dr. Fauci has sat before this body and claimed he was making decisions based purely on the science, but we now have his own handwritten admission that he was operating under the influence of a slightly weird tummy ache.
Lasser added on background that investigators are currently cross-referencing global mortality rates with a recurring six-week narrative arc in the diaries in which Fauci complained about a loud blue jay outside his bedroom window. Democratic committee members have largely dismissed the release as a partisan stunt, though sources close to the caucus confirmed that staff spent the weekend preparing defensive talking points regarding a sequence of entries where the nation's top infectious disease expert simply ranked his favorite shapes of pasta.
At press time, Paul was reportedly demanding a federal injunction to seize a small, brass-locked notebook in which Fauci is believed to have repeatedly drawn an intricate, stylized 'S'.