Dr. Anthony Fauci said he expects to be the target of a GOP witch hunt if Republicans wrest back control of Congress in the 2022 midterm elections.
“It’s Benghazi hearings all over again,” Fauci told the Washington Post on Tuesday in reference to Republican pledges to compel him through the use of subpoenas to cough up information about his alleged funding of gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology prior to the pandemic.
“They’ll try to beat me up in public, and there’ll be nothing there,” Fauci said. “But it will distract me from doing my job, the way it’s doing right now.”
By referencing the Benghazi hearings, Fauci was comparing himself to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who was the focal point of a two-year House Republican-led investigation into the 2012 attacks in Libya that resulted in the deaths of four Americans.
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Members of a radical Islamic militant group launched a coordinated assault on an American diplomatic compound in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012, killing U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens, foreign service officer Sean Smith, and CIA contractors Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty.
In the first days following the attack, Clinton and Susan Rice, now the director of the U.S. Domestic Policy Council, incorrectly blamed a poorly produced YouTube video for inciting militants into storming the compound.
The House Select Committee on Benghazi found no evidence of culpability by Clinton when it issued its final report on its investigation in June 2016, but lawmakers did rebuke her State Department as well as the Defense Department and the CIA for failing to anticipate the security needs of the diplomatic mission in Benghazi.
Fauci’s most outspoken critic in Congress, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, pledged to issue subpoenas against the infectious disease expert if Republicans retake the Senate.
“If we take over the Senate next year, I’ll be chairman of the health committee, and I pledge to use the subpoena power to get every last record about the origin of the virus, about Fauci,” Paul said in December.
Paul also introduced legislation on Monday to eliminate Fauci’s role as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and split the organization into three separate institutes. The senator said Fauci’s role in pushing “ineffective, unscientific lockdowns and mandates” to fight against the spread of COVID-19 must be curtailed.
“We’ve learned a lot over the past two years, but one lesson in particular is that no one person should be deemed ‘dictator in chief,'” Paul said. “No one person should have unilateral authority to make decisions for millions of Americans.”
Fauci and Paul have publicly sparred in numerous Senate hearings about allegations that the NIAID, under Fauci’s control, funded gain-of-function research on bat-based coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology prior to the pandemic.
Fauci categorically denied in multiple hearings that his agency funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan, but records released in September revealed that EcoHealth Alliance, the NIAID grantee that divvied taxpayer funds to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to study bat-based coronaviruses, created a chimeric coronavirus in Wuhan labs that caused mice with humanized cells to become sicker than those infected with the natural strain from which it was crafted.
“Surprise surprise — Fauci lied again. And I was right about his agency funding novel Coronavirus research at Wuhan,” Paul said in reaction to the records.
Surprise surprise – Fauci lied again
And I was right about his agency funding novel Coronavirus research at Wuhan.
Read this thread and the papers released. https://t.co/zQizKXLdbd
— Rand Paul (@RandPaul) September 7, 2021
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Lawrence Tabak, the National Institutes of Health’s principal deputy director, put EcoHealth Alliance on notice the following month for failing to report its findings on its lab-made chimeric coronavirus immediately.
Richard Ebright, a professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University, told the Washington Examiner at the time that Tabak’s letter was a “bombshell” that proved Fauci lied when he claimed the NIH had not funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan.
Fauci came under fire by House Republicans in February after the release of emails that suggested that he and former NIH Director Francis Collins worked behind the scenes during the first weeks of the pandemic to cast doubt on the possibility that COVID-19 could have leaked from a Wuhan lab.
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“Instead of alerting national security experts to the potential threat that scientists were questioning the origin of the SARS2 virus, you shut down debate about the COVID-19 origin,” Republican Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, the ranking member on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, told Fauci in a letter in February.
