RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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See the full story · 7 sourcesPresident tells reporters he watched entire hearing, during which Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment to every single question, even as his war with Iran continues to rage and amid continued economic pain for Americans
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The President of the United States admitted to spending three hours of his morning watching one of his Covid-era political nemeses repeatedly invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination during a contentious Senate hearing, seemingly shirking more pressing matters such as the war with Iran he started five months earlier.
President Donald Trump told reporters on Wednesday that he’d taken in the entirety of Dr. Anthony Fauci ’s appearance before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee when pressed on whether the retired immunologist should face consequences for declining to answer questions from Kentucky Senator Rand Paul and other Republicans who’ve expressed a desire to see him imprisoned for a range of fantastical reasons.
“I watched the whole thing today,” Trump said during an Oval Office event to announce renovations to Washington’s Dulles International Airport.
Fauci, who served as NIAID’s director from 1984 until December 2022 and played key roles in American efforts to combat HIV, Ebola, Swine Flu and Covid-19 during that time, appeared before the GOP-led panel as part of Senator Paul’s long-running push to validate what were considered at the time to be fringe, partisan theories about the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic and the best treatments to combat the coronavirus.
Though enjoyed a sterling reputation in and out of government when he became a prominent member of Trump’s Coronavirus Task Force during the last year of the president’s first term, he quickly became a hate object for Republicans after his medical advice contradicted Trump’s sunny pronouncements about the progress of America’s fight against the pandemic.
In a brief statement before the panel, he cited Paul’s years-long “obvious obsession” with seeing him prosecuted as well as the Kentuckian’s “repeated slanderous comments about me, and recently, his publicly releasing my personal diary aimed at embarrassing and intimidating me.”
He accused Paul, an eye surgeon by training with no infectious disease expertise, of summoning him before the committee to induce him to “say something, anything, that can vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up in his words, quote, ‘behind bars’” before telling senators he would decline to answer questions on the advice of his attorney.
Despite Trump’s repeated clashes with Fauci during his first term, he declined to heed calls from allies to sack the longtime civil servant. But he downplayed Fauci’s role in the coronavirus response, telling reporters that he’d “inherited” the infectious disease expert and claimed to have “disagreed with him on a lot.”
“Fauci wanted to have nobody wearing masks, if you remember, and then everybody had to wear five masks, as many masks as you could get. I mean, made a lot of mistakes, and he wasn't a big factor for me. He was a very big factor for Biden,” Trump said.
The president’s admission that he’d devoted such a large chunk of his work day to watching the 85-year-old physician testify before Congress came at the start of a madcap question-and-answer session with reporters, during which Trump declined to endorse re-litigating former President Joe Biden’s decision to grant Fauci a sweeping pardon on his final day in office.
He also told reporters it was “too bad” for Senate Majority Leader John Thune and the Republican Party that Thune again said there are not enough votes in the upper chamber to enact Trump’s partisan voting restriction bill, the SAVE America Act, or to change Senate rules to eliminate the chamber’s de facto 60-vote supermajority requirement for most legislation.
Trump has spent months demanding passage of the anti-voting bill, which would ban most postal balloting and make it far more difficult for many Americans — including most married women — to register to vote or cast ballots.
Thune has repeatedly maintained that the bill would not garner enough support from Democrats to end debate on it — even if it had support from all of the chamber’s Republicans, which it does not.
But Trump told reporters that the South Dakota senator should “get it done” nonetheless, though he did not offer suggestions as to how.
The president also took time to wade into international waters by suggesting that newly-minted British prime minister Andy Burnham would “open up the North Sea” to oil drilling.
Asked to weigh in on Burnham’s short tenure so far, Trump told a reporter from the right-wing GB News channel that Burnham had “said he's going to open up North Sea oil.”
“If he does that, you're going to be a wealthy country,” he said.
But he also cautioned that Burnham and his Labour government face a “huge immigration problem” from non-white asylum seekers — as well as from what might be an even more dangerous peril in the president’s eyes: Wind turbines.
“He's got windmills all over the place, and every any time you see windmills, you see a failing country, and they're made in China, not used by China, but they're made in China,” he said.
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