Legal Immunity and Congressional Oversight

Paul, now live. There is an argument,

this has probably never been tested legally,

if you've been granted complete immunity.

We didn't grant him immunity,

but the President,

President Biden, granted him complete immunity.

With the grant of immunity, do you

still need Fifth Amendment protections, or do they apply?

And telling that all you had to do

today was tell the truth.

If he testified and told the truth,

even if he admitted to destroying thousands of records,

which we think happened, there's no penalty that attaches,

it would just be the truth.

How do you respond to his comments

that you have an unhinged obsession with him?

I think if you look at all of the questions that were asked,

they're all very, very serious questions.

You know, one of the questions, you know, was

about the particular type of urine cleavage site,

that its codons were CGG, CGG.

This was actually seen by a Nobel laureate, David Baltimore,

I don't know what his political partisanship is,

but a famous microbiologist or molecular chemist who

said that that was the smoking gun

that made him think that it came from the lab.

All of these were scientific questions.

There were some questions about,

you know, him entertaining and advocating with government employees for monetary prizes and awards,

but that's a legitimate oversight question.

If he was using government employees to apply for a million dollar award,

I think that's a legitimate question.

I heard very few questions today that

I would say were unhinged or politically motivated.

I don't think any of the questions that I put forward,

they were on destroying records and whether or not the research in Wuhan was dangerous.

See, in the past we've quibbled with him over what is the definition of gain of function.

He said, but didn't meet the exact definition.

I think the American people want to know was it dangerous

research and should it have been funded?

And that gets away from a semantics argument,

and I think we could have gone there.

Look, for the first year of this pandemic,

from 2020 all the way into the summer of 2021,

I didn't really pay much attention to Anthony Fauci

other than his prescriptions about masks and things like that.

But as far as the origins, I didn't really get

interested in it until I read an article by Nicholas Wade in, I think, the spring of 2021.

That's when I became intrigued that, wow, we could have been funding this.

So I was completely neutral on Anthony Fauci until

he began asking questions, but until we began seeing the revealed emails

that what they say in private was different than In private,

he said, wasn't the wet market. In

public, he said for five years it was the wet market.

In private, his virologist said, looks like the virus has been manipulated.

In public, I said, it's not even plausible that it could have been.

So this contradiction between public and private is really what's damaged-

Mr. Chairman, where does accountability go from here?

Are you saying he's not legally allowed to do that?

No, I think the courts will have to figure out whether or not,

if you have a complete pardon, whether you have a liability against incrimination.

Can you incriminate yourself if you have a pardon?

I think it's going to be a question for the courts.

Where does accountability go from here? Why not subpoena the assistant and some of the other individuals mentioned?

There will be questions and she will be subpoenaed for a deposition,

probably not a big full hearing, but she will be asked about that.

I mean, her email that she deleted tons of emails was in 2018.

We find a scattering of them, but we also feel confident that hundreds,

if not thousands, were deleted over a 40-year period and that we just don't have access to those.

access to what's left, you can't always determine what was removed,

but I think it's an important question.

Would you hold Dr. Fauci in contempt?

Do you think that you would have the vote in the Senate to do that?

That's the vote that will happen in committee next week.

It will be in contempt of Congress.

We believe that with his liability, his immunity from the criminal liability,

that he didn't need to hide behind the Fifth Amendment

and that maybe the Fifth Amendment doesn't attach when you have a pardon in place.

That'll be a legal question.

But the question on contempt will be voted on,

and then there's a question of whether or not the Department of Justice will take that up.

I've recommended before for his criminal prosecution,

and neither the Biden DOJ nor the Trump DOJ have taken it up.

All I can do is recommend prosecution.

I can't initiate a prosecution.

Did you find anything incriminating in the diary entries?

I think to me, there's a lot of interest.

Obviously, that he was using eight personnel in the NIH to advocate for monetary rewards.

When there was a question of the monetary rewards,

he was responding, you know, we have to get to yes on this.

And it's not an insignificant amount of money.

We're talking about a $100 award and a dinner certificate, talking

about a million dollars. Not only was he advocating for himself,

he was asking others to fill out applications for him to get the million-dollar prize.

He specifically wanted the money, he wanted the waiver.

I think it is illegal to use your employees to try to get monetary rewards.

So yes on that.

The other most important thing that came from the diaries is that privately in January 2020,

he was already acknowledging that it didn't come from the wet market.

Now, that's just dishonesty. That may not be a crime.

But he knew in January 2020 that the earliest cases did not come from the wet market.

They came from somewhere else.

But you saw the clips. That was just what we found in about 24 hours.

We found maybe 10 different clips of him saying, hey, the wet market,

the wet market, the wet market.

Why is he doing that? It's not just an innocent argument. The wet market points to it being of nature.

If it's not from the wet market, it might be from the lab.

Who funded the lab? See, he's been self-interested.

You know, people, and many, we won't say who they are, but many in the media treated everything he said as disinterested.

He was self-interested from the very beginning. He was self-interested in making sure that nobody concluded it came from the lab.

He didn't treat them equally.

He was like, holy, you know what? If it came from the lab, I funded the lab.

I could be responsible for this entire pandemic. And so he, I think, obscured any facts that would have led to his concluding.

But look, it's not just me.

If you were to ask, you know, 100 scientists who are in this area, there's a split in them.

And even the ones who say they might still think it's nature are saying, like Christian representative might be, and maybe we overstated our case.

The fact that the virologist that wrote Proximal Origins that he commissioned,

he edited, and then he displayed from the White House, the fact that the authors of that have doubts,

really should lead us all to have some doubts.

I got one or two more.

Can I ask you about the president's praise?

He has said some positive comments about you leading up to this hearing.

Did you talk to the White House at all?

I didn't, but I always loved getting praise from the president.

One more here.

Senator, if there is so much there there,

and you referred him to the DOJ, the Trump DOJ,

why have they not taken anything up against him, especially since they have taken it up against one of his colleagues? Right.

Well, I think the case against David Morenz is pretty significant.

I think when Senator Scott pointed out that he threw his friend under the bus,

David Morenz has eaten at the house, he's broken bread with Fauci, they were friends for 20 years. His assistant, chief assistant for 20 years.

What did Fauci say about him in the, investigating the house,

hardly knew him,

worked in another building, didn't come to our policy meeting.

He downplayed the association because the things that Morenz was caught saying were so clearly illegal and unsavory.

But here's my question.

I wonder what David Morenz today under indictment has to say about Anthony Fauci.

So I think there is the potential that David Morenz has information that would be very interesting to all of us.

But as far as who gets to determine things, it's like your question on the pardon.

I'm not the final word on that.

I can, I can say that I think there are questions whether you have a pardon, whether the fifth amendment applies when you have a pardon.

That's for a court to decide. So the DOJ will have to look at that and I'm not here to condemn the DOJ, they have to make legal decisions.

Do they think they can make it, they can make it stick,

will they be dismissed immediately, will it be seen by the public as frivolous?

They will have to make those decisions.

I do know that a great number of the population feels that Anthony Fauci was dishonest because of what he was saying in private,

was different or the opposite.