Sen. Elizabeth Warren went from cool and collected to visibly incensed when iResearch confronted her with questions about Senate Democrats’ continued defense of disgraced former NIH Director Anthony Fauci.
WASHINGTON — Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., is generally friendly to the press. She will stand in a hallway, take questions and talk past the point of courtesy. Put her on the spot about Democrats still rallying around Dr. Anthony Fauci, and the friendliness dies on contact.
After Republicans on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee voted Aug. 6 to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress, Warren launched into a familiar warning: Republicans, she said, were backing measures that would gut hospitals nationwide. She spoke at length. She filled the air. She did not answer the question hanging over the vote.
The contempt resolution followed Fauci’s July 29 appearance before the panel chaired by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky. The former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times rather than answer questions about his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. Republicans argue a sweeping pardon issued in the final days of the Biden administration undercuts that claim. Democrats call the referral a stunt. The Justice Department has confirmed it received the referral and is reviewing it.
This reporter asked Warren why Democrats continue to protect Fauci — the public face of mask mandates, COVID-19 shots and boosters, and hospital protocols that included early, aggressive intubation and remdesivir, a drug later associated with liver toxicity. She did not defend those policies. She did not explain the loyalty. She cut the exchange short and trained her attention on whether I was reading from my notes.
That is the tell. When a senator who never met a lectern she didn’t like suddenly becomes a handwriting critic, the argument is already lost.Fauci is no longer a federal official. He is a private citizen with a presidential pardon, a Senate subpoena and a political party that still treats questions about lockdowns, school closures, mandates and early-pandemic hospital practice as an attack on science itself.
Warren’s hospital-collapse monologue was the talking point. The notebook jab was the real answer: don’t ask.
Democrats spent years selling Fauci as the voice of authority. A Senate committee has now voted to hold him in contempt for refusing to answer for that authority. When I pressed Warren on why her party is still standing in front of him, she reached for condescension and deflection.
Americans who lived through the mandates do not need a seminar on what that looks like. They watched it.
