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Diary fuels Trump clash
Dr. Anthony Fauci’s diary excerpts released by Republican Sen. Rand Paul, the head of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, cover entries from December 2019 through December 2022, including Fauci’s account of meeting President Trump on January 29, 2020, in the White House Situation Room.
“Washington — Republican Sen”
In the diary, Fauci wrote that Trump told him, “Anthony, you are really a famous guy,” and that Trump later thanked him, saying, “We are counting on you.”
Fauci’s entries also describe a deterioration in his relationship with Trump, with the Guardian reporting that by March 2021 Fauci branded Trump “an obnoxious adolescent.”
The Guardian says the diary shows Fauci’s disillusionment with Trump’s approach during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, including Fauci’s description of Trump as “rambling” and “crazy.”
Paul’s hearing and reactions
Paul released “over 1,000 pages” of Fauci’s diaries as part of an investigation into the origins of Covid-19, which Paul claims came from a laboratory leak in Wuhan, China, and the diary release is set to be tested in a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee hearing.
CNN reports that Fauci’s lawyers wrote to Paul that his request for Fauci to appear “arises within a context that cannot be ignored,” citing “repeated public and absolutely baseless pronouncements by you, a sitting United States Senator.”
The Guardian frames the diary release as an attempt to damage Fauci, saying the entries show Trump being described as “bumbling” and “incompetent,” and it also quotes Fauci’s view that Trump was “desperate” in pushing to open up the country.
In the same dispute over what Fauci did and did not do publicly, Fox News says a March 15, 2020 entry records Fauci writing, “I spoke with Bill de Blasio (the mayor of New York) and convinced him” to close New York’s schools.
Origins debate and stakes
The diary release arrives as Paul’s committee presses questions about Covid-19 origins, with Forbes stating Paul will question Fauci about “gain-of-function research” and an alleged “COVID-19 cover-up,” and it also says Paul accused Fauci of not being honest in the last six years.
“Even before the United States declared a national lockdown amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr”
Forbes also reports that Sen. Ron Johnson said he does not “expect to get much out of” Fauci during the hearing and will ask questions about what he called a “miserably failed response to COVID.”
Beyond the hearing, the dispute is tied to how Fauci’s private notes are read against later public statements, with Fox News asserting that Fauci denied in an October 16, 2022 interview with Jonathan for ABC News that he had anything to do with school closures.
Fox News further says Fauci testified on January 9, 2024 that “I did not close the schools,” and it adds that Fauci wrote in his private diary that he advised de Blasio to go ahead with “stay-at-home confinement for the entire city.”
