Tony Fauci may join Hunter Biden in getting a presidential pardon

This idea is beyond terrible; it will destroy whatever little confidence Americans still have in public health.

On Sunday, President Biden broke his word and gave his son Hunter a broad federal pardon. Even many Democrats condemned the move.

Now Biden may take an even more radical and dangerous step. White House officials are discussing offering Dr. Anthony S. Fauci a broad “preemptive pardon,” like the one for Hunter, that would save him from future federal prosecutions.

But why exactly does Fauci need - or deserve - such protection? Yes, he may be vulnerable for breaking federal laws against lying to Congress or government investigators. But he will turn 84 later this month. That fact alone means his risk of imprisonment is minimal.

The questions about what Fauci knew about the origins of Sars-Cov-2, and whether he misled Congress and the public, are real and serious. If Biden pardons Fauci and quashes any possible criminal investigations into what he said and did, the firestorm will be even uglier than the blowback over Hunter’s pardon.

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(Unreported Truths. And reporting their lies. With your help.)

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The pardon might be part of a wave of new pardons that could also include prominent opponents of Donald Trump like Liz Cheney, Politico and The New York Times have reported.

Fauci does not fall in that category, but Republicans have harshly criticized him for failing to disclose his links to the risky coronavirus research that likely caused Covid.

In a June interview with me, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) called Fauci “manipulative” and added “I think he’s an incredible actor… I see a very purposeful covering up of what went on and his link to it.”

The deepest concerns involve Fauci’s relationship with Dr. Ralph Baric, a North Carolina scientist who is the godfather of coronavirus research. I have reported extensively on Baric and Fauci, including a 2013 conference at the National Institutes of Health where Baric told Fauci of his plans to make coronaviruses more dangerous.

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(Why indeed?)

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The NIH then went on to support Baric and Peter Daszak, a British zoologist who made a career of hyping potential threats of epidemics, as they worked with Chinese scientists in Wuhan to help make coronaviruses riskier. (Yes, that’s exactly what they were doing. They couldn’t find natural coronaviruses that seemed dangerous enough, so they engineered their own.)

Despite years of investigation, the details of Baric’s relationship with the Chinese scientists who worked in Wuhan remain obscure.

But what is clear is that in late January 2020, as Covid exploded worldwide, Fauci feared Sars-Cov-2 might have been modified in and leaked from the Wuhan lab - and that NIH-funded research might have played a role.

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(Guess we’ll never find out)

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With Fauci’s knowledge and approval, Daszak and leading virologists then launched a campaign insisting Sars-Cov-2 must be natural and claiming anyone who investigated or even discussed the possibility that it had leaked from a lab was racist.

The campaign worked long enough to make an independent investigation nearly impossible. Meanwhile, Fauci hid his role in steering it.

Maybe none of this violated any federal laws.

After all, no one has offered hard evidence that Fauci knew early on that Sars-Cov-2 was manmade - or that he funded the specific experiments in China that likely produced it. So prosecutors would more likely focus on whether Fauci lied about his concerns and his relationship with Baric - the cover-up, not the crime.

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(Reporting cover-ups and crimes too. For less than 20 cents a day.)

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Given Fauci’s age and the fact that many Americans still view him as a hero, such a prosecution would be controversial. It would face legal obstacles too. Under oath or not, Fauci is very good at parsing his statements and giving himself wiggle room.

That said, the criminal statute against lying to federal officials, commonly known as “1001,” is very broad. It covers all “materially false” statements “within the jurisdiction” of the federal government. It carries a sentence of up to five years.

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(1001, the prosecutor’s friend)

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Despite years of Congressional inquiries into Fauci, Daszak, and Covid’s origins, stonewalling by the National Institutes of Health means that we still do not know exactly what Fauci knew or suspected about Covid’s origins. A criminal investigation that carries the real possibility of prosecution or prison time is our last, best hope to get to the full truth.

If Biden makes that investigation impossible, Americans will become even more distrustful of the public health mandarins who brought us Covid lockdowns and mRNA vaccine mandates.

As they should.