Pursuing an 85-year-old Anthony Fauci toward a prison cell is a "travesty," Guardian columnist Margaret Sullivan argued Monday, even as she acknowledged the retired scientist didn't get everything right at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Her column followed a move by Sen. Rand Paul's committee, which voted along party lines to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress and routed the referral straight to the Justice Department for possible prosecution. The vote came after Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment rights more than 100 times at a hearing, declining to answer Paul's questions about the pandemic's origins.
Sullivan cast the contempt push as the culmination of a years-long political campaign against Fauci. The scientist himself has said the exercise was built to make good on what he described as Paul's own pledge to see him put "behind bars."
She also pointed to a parallel Republicans rarely mention: Donald Trump invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 400 times during a 2022 civil deposition in New York. Taking the Fifth, Sullivan wrote, is a routine legal choice, not an admission of guilt.
Former President Joe Biden pre-emptively pardoned Fauci before leaving office in January 2025, but that pardon covers nothing after Jan. 19, 2025, and does not block state or local charges — potentially leaving him exposed.
Sullivan drew a line between fair debate over pandemic missteps and what she sees as a Republican campaign that will damage public health for years.
"Legitimate debate about what went wrong – and even who was at fault – is reasonable. There may well be something to learn from it. But that’s a far cry from the travesty of what we’ve just seen take place on Capitol Hill," she wrote.
"And, lamentably, there’s little reason to believe that Trump’s weaponized justice department will put an end to it," Sullivan concluded.
