Pardon Me, But This Is Bullshit

by Matt Taibbi | Dec 05, 2024

They’re laughing at us now. From Politico:

White House officials… are carefully weighing the extraordinary step of handing out blanket pardons to those who’ve committed no crimes… [worried] it could suggest impropriety, only fueling Trump’s criticisms, and because those offered preemptive pardons may reject them… mentioned by Biden’s aides for a pardon is Anthony Fauci, the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who became a lightning rod for criticism from the right during the Covid-19 pandemic.

If Anthony Fauci gets a “blanket” pardon, he’ll wrap himself and sleep in it. Plan B was living under an assumed name in Argentina, dressed in the Anthony Hopkins vacation suit from Silence of the Lambs. Throughout the pandemic the NIAID head showed he was willing to do anything, from shuttering schools to lying to Congress to making private campaign stops at intelligence agencies to urge investigators off his path, to keep the ick of scandal off his person. He won’t reject squat.

The Politico piece by Jonathan Martin might be the first of the era that needs to be read entirely between the lines. White House officials are “carefully weighing” preemptive pardons really means White House officials already decided, but are publicly floating the idea. Pardons for “those who’ve committed no crimes” means those who’ve committed crimes. “Could suggest impropriety” is would admit impropriety. Criticism from “the right” is criticism from all. It goes on:

When Martin reports the pardons are being discussed by White House counsel Ed Siskel and chief of staff Jeff Zients, and adds “the president himself, who was intensely focused on his son’s pardon, has not been brought into the broader pardon discussions yet,” it means there’s no paternal angle to a potential pardon of Fauci or Adam Schiff and sources would like someone other than Biden to eat the political hit. That discussions are supposedly taking place both away from Biden’s ears and in the pages of Politico is unintentionally hilarious.

Martin went on to say the discussions were spurred by “quiet lobbying by congressional Democrats,” though “not by those seeking pardons themselves,” because as one “well-connected Democrat” put it, “The beneficiaries know nothing.” (But we want it published. The beneficiaries know everything.) Martin added, “some congressional Democrats… are uneasy about the idea of being granted a pardon they’re not seeking.” (They’re not uneasy about pardons they are seeking.) “I would urge the president not to do that,” said Schiff. “I think it would seem defensive and unnecessary.” (Bullshit and no he doesn’t.)

The piece quotes Biden ally and Pennsylvania congressman Brendan Boyle, who said “the time for cautious restraint is over. We must act with urgency to push back against these threats.” (The incoming president is someone we tried to jail for 10,000 years and we’re moving our families to salt mines.) Then there was this incredible passage:

Even the threat of retaliation could prove costly to individuals because they’d be forced to hire high-priced lawyers to defend themselves… Some Biden appointees… are already considering taking the best-paying jobs next year in part to ensure they have the resources to defend themselves against any investigations.

As opposed to the lower-paying jobs they planned on taking? And “considering”? They already took them.

Anyone who listened to Monday’s America This Week knows I’m a big believer in the presidential pardon, as a check against institutional overreach. Like the ability to appoint Supreme Court judges and fill a cabinet, it’s a power voters specifically send presidents to Washington to exercise. The loftier purpose is to allow presidents to “temper justice with mercy,” but Alexander Hamilton also saw a tool for slowing political gang warfare, noting a well-timed reprieve of an insurgent might restore “tranquility of the commonwealth.”

None of those reasons would apply here. Declaration of Independence signatory James Wilson argued in 1787 that a “pardon before conviction might be necessary in order to obtain the testimony of accomplices,” but we’re talking about Anthony Fauci. What evidence is there that he’d disclose any ugly story, even one that’s not maybe criminal but merely embarrassing, for the sake of the public interest?

Republicans on the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic (SSCP) just this week issued a 512-page report over which Democrats are doing an end zone dance, calling it a “Fauci Flop.” The Democrats’ paper crows the investigation proved Fauci “did not create SARS-CoV-2,” “did not lie to Congress regarding ‘gain-of-function’ research” and “did not orchestrate the ‘Proximal Origin’ paper.” That the latter two claims are either outright falsehoods or dubious at best is beside the point. The premise of the minority paper is that the search for answers about Covid is itself a red herring, a GOP sideshow that “relentlessly attacked Dr. Fauci” solely to damage “Americans’ trust in our nation’s health officials.”

A separate summary of the SSCP report is forthcoming. A main takeaway is key witnesses both in government and in the scientific community are getting away with a health-sector version of the “blue wall” strategy, shutting mouths, hiding evidence, and either lying to investigators or openly throwing them off the trail. Maybe for some the SSCP probe is a political scalp-hunt, but most Americans surely just want any definitive answer about the cause of a pandemic that infected hundreds of millions and upended billions of lives. There can’t be any tolerance for obstruction when it comes to this mystery, and Fauci on this score has a lot of explaining to do.

The SSCP report cites current chief scientist of the WHO and then-Director of the Wellcome Trust Dr. Jeremy Farrar as saying “initial discussions regarding the sequence of COVID-19 and any unusual aspects began on January 8 or 9” of 2020. Farrar’s initial reaction was, “Could the novel coronavirus be anything to do with ‘gain-of-function’ (GOF) studies?” The paper quotes scientists who eventually wrote a paper in Nature Medicine called “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” that argued the virus was “not a laboratory construct.” The future authors of that paper discuss collaboration between a federally-funded scientist at UNC-Chapel Hill, Ralph Baric, and the Wuhan Institute’s Shi Zhengli:

Dr. Andersen went on to express concerns regarding two distinct aspects of the virus—the RBD and the furin cleavage site. Dr. Andersen also found a paper written by Dr. Baric and Dr. Shi… that purported to have inserted furin cleavage sites into SARS. As recounted by Dr. Farrar, this paper was a “how-to-manual for building the Wuhan coronavirus in a laboratory.” Dr. Holmes responded, “fuck, this is bad” and “oh my god what worse words than that.”

Fauci ends up helping to organize the writing of the Proximal paper and spends years denying any connection between the pandemic and Wuhan Institute of Virology. He testified before Senator Rand Paul that “the NIH and NIAID categorically has not funded gain-of-function research to be conducted in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” But Fauci knew at least as early as a January 27, 2020 email (as reported by the excellent Emily Kopp at U.S. Right to Know) that his NIAID had in fact been funding such research for five years. Fauci played word games to get around talking about “gain-of-function” research (his chief of staff even typed “g#in-of-function” to try to thwart FOIA queries) and later claimed his exchange with Paul had been based on a “very precise definition” of “gain-of-function” based on “P3CO framework.”

Fauci through the pandemic seemed more interested in cutting off talk about “gain-of-function” or the work of colleagues like Baric or Dr. Peter Daszak than he did in locating the disease’s origin. He seemed satisfied with the zoonotic theory with suspicious alacrity, one reason he needs to be subjected to pressure of some kind to talk. His conspicuous incuriosity is a quality he shares with congressional Democrats, whose “Fauci flop” report is in some ways the most damaging piece of new evidence in the Covid saga.

The paper was the Democrats’ best chance to offer a take on a great Generational Mystery. Apart from “Fauci didn’t do it,” though, they have nothing to say. They don’t argue for natural origin. They don’t even say something noncommittal, about evidence being inconclusive. The origin issue simply doesn’t exist for them, and they equate looking back at all with “attacks” on the system. “Select Subcommittee Democrats,” they write, “have maintained a focus on continued efforts to mitigate the threat COVID-19 poses… and reforms to strengthen future pandemic prevention.” They talk about testing and contact tracing and the need for “continued development of new Covid-19 therapeutics,” and “health data collection.” But that’s it. Their concluding remarks read like ingredients on a gum wrapper:

bullshit

I said repeatedly the last few years that pursuing criminal charges against a likely major party opponent was almost inevitably a bad idea, that if you’re going to do it, it had better be for an extremely serious crime and your evidence should be stacked a mile high. Otherwise, you’re inviting political opponents to floor it when they get in office. Naturally, Democrats pushed a 34-count indictment for paying a porn star that involved stitching one half-baked legal theory atop another to create felony charges.

Now they’re immunizing themselves in advance, which is predictable and pathetic and incidentally says a lot about how they viewed the reasons behind the Trump prosecutions. We’re moving on and I can live with most of it, but Covid is different. Can any political consideration possibly justify cutting off investigation of the world’s biggest mystery? Not for me. What kind of person is satisfied with not knowing?