Dr. Anthony Fauci is set to face the Senate's Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Wednesday after Rand Paul released more than 1,100 pages of his private journal entries. The release puts Fauci's own notes at the center of a hearing that Paul has long used to press his case that the former government health official misled Americans about COVID-19.
The pages cover Fauci's journals from December 2019 through December 2022 and were made public over the weekend, giving lawmakers a fresh stack of material just before he appears. Paul said the documentation was extraordinary and told reporters that he had used subpoena powers to obtain what he called Tony's Diary.
The release includes Fauci's inner thoughts about the origins of COVID, a log of events inside the White House situation and press briefing rooms, and notes tied to his media appearances on the response to COVID-19 and other health outbreaks. It arrives as Paul, who chairs the committee, says he wants Fauci held accountable for his oversight during the pandemic response and has even called in the past for his imprisonment.
There is also a built-in contradiction in the record. Fauci's journals describe a Feb. 1, 2020 call with 12 scientists who were not in agreement about whether the virus had emerged through natural spillover or a lab leak. Fauci wrote that two of the 12 scientists were convinced it came about naturally, while the rest felt that deliberate insertion was possible, and he added, 'we could not let this go.' That sits alongside Fauci's long public stance that natural spillover remains the most likely explanation for the pandemic.
Paul has long accused Fauci of deceiving Americans about the origin of COVID-19, and Fauci has been shielded from potential prosecution by a preemptive pardon issued by President Joe Biden. Biden said the pardon was not an admission of guilt but a response to what he described as threats of unjustified and politically motivated prosecutions. The hearing is now the next test of whether Paul's document dump changes anything beyond the politics around the case.
What matters on Wednesday is less whether the journals reopen the origin debate than whether Paul can use them to show a gap between Fauci's private notes and his public testimony. The journals do not reveal new information about where COVID came from, but they give Paul a way to argue that the country is still being asked to trust versions of events that do not fully match the private record.
