President Joe Biden on Monday issued a preemptive pardon to Dr. Anthony Fauci, among other potential Trump targets, though claimed it should not be “misconstrued as an admission of guilt”. ABC News has more.
“Our nation relies on dedicated, selfless public servants every day. They are the lifeblood of our democracy,” Biden said in a statement just hours before President-elect Donald Trump is sworn into office.
“Yet alarmingly, public servants have been subjected to ongoing threats and intimidation for faithfully discharging their duties,” Biden added.
Trump in his 2024 campaign repeatedly vowed “retribution” on his political enemies, specifically singling out lawmakers like Liz Cheney who investigated the attack on the U.S. Capitol. Trump said Cheney and other committee members should be put in jail.
Milley, who retired as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 2023, has long been a target of Republican attacks over the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. Fauci, the former Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has been a lightning rod for criticism over the federal Government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. …
Fauci told ABC News Chief Washington Correspondent Jonathan Karl he accepted the pardon and is grateful for it.
“I really truly appreciate the action President Biden has taken today on my behalf,” Fauci said. “Let me be perfectly clear, Jon, I have committed no crime, you know that, and there are no possible grounds for any allegation or threat of criminal investigation or prosecution of me.”
But Fauci said the threats and possibility of prosecution “creates immeasurable and intolerable distress on me and my family”.
ABC News reported in early December that Biden was considering such an action, days after he issued a full pardon for his son, Hunter Biden. In an exit interview with USA Today earlier this month, Biden signalled he was still wrestling with the decision.
Some Democrats argued against preemptive pardons, including Sen. Adam Schiff, who served on the House January 6th Committee.
“The precedent of giving blanket pardons, preemptive blanket pardons on the way out of an administration, I think is a precedent we don’t want to set,” Schiff said on ABC’s This Week in December.
In issuing the pardons, Biden added:
The issuance of these pardons should not be mistaken as an acknowledgment that any individual engaged in any wrongdoing, nor should acceptance be misconstrued as an admission of guilt for any offence. Our nation owes these public servants a debt of gratitude for their tireless commitment to our country.
Worth reading in full.
Alex Berenson previously noted that this will only make it harder to get to the truth about Covid’s origin, furthering eroding the public’s trust in state institutions:
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.
Following Trump’s election victory in November, Elon Musk reaffirmed that his “pronouns are still prosecute/Fauci“.
On Substack, virologist Alex Washburne sets out why Fauci should have been very worried by the prospect of the criminal investigation he now appears to have dodged:
In 2017, DARPA organized a grant call – the PREEMPT call – aiming to preempt pathogen spillover from wildlife to people. In 2018 a newly formed collaborative group of scientists from the US, Singapore, and Wuhan wrote a grant – the DEFUSE grant – proposing to modify a bat sarbecovirus in Wuhan in a very unusual way. DARPA did not fund the team because their work was too risky for the Department of Defence, but in 2019 Fauci’s NIAID funded this exact set of scientists who never wrote a paper together prior nor since. In late 2019, SARS-CoV-2 emerged in Wuhan with the precise modifications proposed in the DEFUSE grant submitted to PREEMPT.
It’s reasonable to be concerned that this line of research funded by Fauci’s NIAID may have caused the pandemic. In fact, if we’re sharp-pencilled and honest with our probabilities, it’s likely beyond reasonable doubt that SARS-CoV-2 emerged as a consequence of research proposed in DEFUSE. What we don’t know, however, is whether the research proceeded with US involvement or not.
Congress used their constitutionally granted investigation and oversight responsibilities to investigate and oversee NIAID in search of answers. In the process of these investigations, they found endless pages of emails with unjustified redactions, evidence that Fauci’s FOIA lady could “make emails disappear”, Fauci’s right-hand-man David Morens aided the DEFUSE authors as they navigated disciplinary measures at NIH and NIAID, and there were significant concerns that NIAID sought to obstruct investigations and destroy federal records.
Such obstructive actions did not inspire confidence in the innocence of Anthony Fauci or the US scientists he funded in 2019. On the contrary, Fauci testified twice under oath saying NIAID did not fund gain of function research of concern in Wuhan… but then we discovered a 2018 progress report of research NIAID funded in Wuhan revealing research they funded had enhanced the transmissibility of a bat SARS-related coronavirus 10,000-times higher than the wild virus. That is, indisputably, gain of function research of concern. Fauci thus lied to the American public and perjured himself in his testimony to congress, and Senator Rand Paul has referred Fauci’s perjury charges to the Department of Justice.
What was NIAID trying to preempt with their obstruction of congressional investigations? What is Biden trying to preempt with his pardon of Fauci? Why do we not have the 2019 NIAID progress report from the PI’s who submitted DEFUSE to PREEMPT and later received funding from NIAID?
It is deplorable for Biden to preemptively pardon Fauci on his last day in office, with so little known about the research NIAID funded in 2019 and voters so clearly eager to learn more. …
A preemptive pardon prior to the discovery of truth is a fancy name for obstruction of justice. The Biden administration’s dying breath must be challenged, and we must allow Congress and the incoming administration to investigate the possibility that Anthony Fauci’s NIAID supported research that caused the COVID-19 pandemic.
Washburne’s article is worth reading in full.
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