President Trump said Monday he has not spoken to Attorney General Todd Blanche nor Jeanine Pirro, the U. S. Attorney for Washington, D. C., regarding prosecuting Dr. Anthony Fauci.
“I have not spoken to them about that, no,” Trump told Semafor’s Shelby Talcott in the Oval Office.
Last Thursday, Republicans on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee approved a resolution holding Fauci in contempt of Congress.
That came roughly a week after the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases invoked the Fifth Amendment 100-plus times and refused to answer questions from GOP lawmakers during a hearing about the COVID-19 pandemic.
While resolutions approved in committee typically go to the full Senate floor, staffers from the office of Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), the chair of the Homeland Security panel, delivered a criminal referral to the Justice Department (DOJ) recommending it prosecute Fauci.
“This is outside of the ordinary bill-making process,” Paul told reporters after the vote. “It doesn’t have to go to the House, it doesn’t have to be signed by the president and really doesn’t have to go before the Senate.”
The DOJ, now led by the newly-sworn-in Blanche, will make the final decision on whether to act on the referral. The Hill has reached out to the DOJ for comment.
Also on Monday, Paul and GOP Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) released text messages Fauci sent and received via his government-issued phone. In a January 2021 text chain, Fauci said the second dose of the COVID-19 vaccine could “theoretically” be associated with miscarriage in the first trimester.
That text, sent to former Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy and former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky, came after Fauci wrote in a text there “are no data or theoretical reason to believe that vaccinating early versus later in pregnancy would be preferred.”
One week after he sent that message, Fauci publicly said the Food and Drug Administration had so far found “no red flags” among the 10,000-plus pregnant women who participated in COVID vaccine trials to that point.
“I would rather take my chances with the vaccine than getting infected while I’m pregnant, because of the adverse effect and adverse outcome on pregnancy [of getting COVID],” Fauci told Dr. Howard Bauchner, then the editor-in-chief of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The texts to Murthy and Walensky are among 34,000 messages on the phone, according to Johnson’s office. There are also 522 voicemails on the device.
After Paul and Johnson released the messages, a slew of Republican lawmakers lambasted Fauci.
“This is evil. I know several women that had the COVID-19 vaccine and miscarried,” Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) wrote on social media, posting a screenshot of Fauci’s text in which he wrote there was a theoretical risk of miscarriage for pregnant women who took the second dose of the vaccine.
“I also remember hearing this at my doctors office when I was pregnant,” Luna added. “This is a crime against humanity.”
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