They Needed Him to Be a Criminal. Six Years Later, They’ve Got a Diary.

A thousand pages, a subpoena, 111 invocations of the Fifth, and a senator screaming profanity at an 85-year-old man. Here’s what’s actually true, including the parts you won’t like.

They Needed Him to Be a Criminal. Six Years Later, They’ve Got a Diary.

A thousand pages, a subpoena, 111 invocations of the Fifth, and a senator screaming profanity at an 85-year-old man. Here’s what’s actually true, including the parts you won’t like.

The Jack Hopkins Now Newsletter #987: Saturday, August 1st, 2026

I’m going to do something in this piece that will annoy people on both sides…so let me warn you up front.

I am not going to tell you Anthony Fauci is a saint. (Although…I am quite vocal about him being one of my heroes.)

I’m going to do something more useful. I’m going to separate the accusations that are flatly false…from the ones that are genuinely unresolved…because they have been deliberately blended together for six years…and the blending is the whole trick.

That’s the con. Take one real…unsettled scientific dispute. Wrap it in nine fabrications. Then dare anyone to sort them…knowing they won’t bother.

Let’s bother.

What Wednesday Actually Was

Rand Paul subpoenaed him. Not invited…subpoenaed an 85-year-old man who has testified before Congress more than 250 times in his career.

Days before the hearing, Paul dumped 1,141 pages of Fauci’s personal diary onto the internet. RFK Jr. said he’d found them on government servers…after an eight-month search and handed them over.

Fauci invoked the Fifth. Reportedly 111 times.

Then…Bernie Moreno leaned into a microphone and asked an 85-year-old man, “Who the fuck do you think you were?”…and…afterward told a reporter Fauci was “a piece of shit.”

Josh Hawley told him he had no Fifth Amendment rights at all.

And Paul’s committee threw Fauci’s lawyer out of the room.

Now hold all that in your head…because here’s the question nobody in that room wanted asked:

If the evidence is overwhelming after six years…why do you need to yell?

Start With The Thing They Won’t Say Out Loud

Fauci invoked the Fifth. Republicans called it an admission of guilt.

Here’s why he did it…in his own words: he said the sole purpose of the hearing was to get him to say something…anything…that could vindicate Paul’s repeated public promise to put him behind bars.

Was that paranoid?

Paul has said publicly…for years…that Fauci belongs in prison. He referred him to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution. Before the hearing…when asked whether Fauci would be charged…he said “we’re going to find out.”

And…here’s the kicker…the part that makes this airtight:

The pardon only covers conduct through January 2025.

Anything Fauci said at Wednesday’s hearing is unprotected.

If he’d testified…and and one Goddamn answer conflicted with something from 2021… a date…a number…a recollection at 85 years old…that’s a perjury referral.

Fox’s own analyst said so on air: the pardon does not protect him from perjury if he lies under oath after receiving it.

So…let’s be precise about what happened.

They built a trap…where the only safe move was silence. Then…they screamed at him for taking it.

That’s not oversight. That’s a dare…with a damn court reporter present.

The Lie: “He Has No Fifth Amendment Rights”

Hawley said it flatly. He cited Brown v. Walker, 1896.

He’s a Yale law graduate. He knows better.

The pardon is backward-looking. It ends in January 2025. Legal analysts have been clear that the scope of Fauci’s privilege here is a complicated question only a court can actually settle…and that there are multiple live avenues of exposure…including future statements and state-level action.

Florida’s attorney general announced an investigation after the hearing. Even skeptics of that theory concede it’s a live wire.

Verdict: false, and knowingly so. Hawley took a genuinely unresolved legal question and announced it as settled, because “you have no rights” makes better television than “the case law is contested.”

The Lie: “He Funded Gain-of-Function Research and Lied About It”

This is the big one, and here’s where I’m going to lose some of you.

Part of this is true. Not the part they say.

What’s true: NIH money went to EcoHealth Alliance. EcoHealth subcontracted roughly $600,000 to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. That is not disputed by anyone… including Fauci…and never has been.

What’s true: NIH’s Lawrence Tabak wrote to Congress describing a limited experiment where mice…infected with a modified bat virus…got sicker than mice infected with the unmodified version. He also said EcoHealth failed to promptly report it.

That’s real. Own it.

Now here’s the part they leave out.

The entire fight is over a definition. Under the federal regulatory standard…the one NIH is legally required to apply…the funded work was reviewed by staff up and down the chain…and judged not to be gain-of-function.

Under a broader…colloquial meaning…used by some virologists…the same experiments arguably qualify.

Both of those things are true at once. That’s not a dodge. That’s what a definitional dispute is.

FactCheck.org’s conclusion: there’s no evidence Fauci lied to Congress…because NIH backed his statement that the work was judged not to be gain-of-function by qualified staff.

Independent reviews have found his statements technically defensible under the applicable definition…while also noting…they were perceived as misleading because they omitted that money flowed…at one remove…to Wuhan collaborators.

Verdict: he is guilty of using a bureaucrat’s definition in a room full of people who wanted a headline. That is a real criticism. I’ll sign it.

It is not a crime. It is not perjury. And…the honest reviewers keep landing in the same place: not proved that he lied; definition-dependent…unresolved.

Six years. Two congressional investigations. A referral to DOJ. No charges. Not because he was pardoned…the pardon came in 2025…years after they started… but because “he used the narrow regulatory definition” is not an indictment.

The Lie: “The Diary Is a Smoking Gun”

A thousand-plus pages of a man’s private journal, released to the public before he could testify, by the senator prosecuting him.

Think about what that is for a second. Whatever you believe about Fauci — that’s your diary, my diary, anybody’s diary, published by a political opponent to soften you up before a hearing.

So what’s in it?

He found the press attention “flattering.” He thought Trump’s briefing remarks were “rambling.” He was bewildered by his own fame. He complained that conspiracy-theory letters from congressmen were an unbelievable waste of time.

A vain man. An exhausted man. A man who liked being on television.

Paul’s actual catch: a January 2020 entry saying the market was “not the source, it was the amplifier,” and a reference to a call…where experts thought the virus might not be natural. Paul says this proves Fauci privately doubted what he publicly asserted.

Here’s the problem with that.

January 2020 is week one. Scientists changing their assessment as data arrives isn’t deception. It’s the job. If a virologist’s January opinion…and his April opinion…were identical, that would be the scandal.

And…reporters who read the pages…found no smoking gun; several outlets said so explicitly.

Verdict: they read a thousand pages of a man’s private life and came back with “he enjoyed being famous.” If that’s the crime…half of Washington…no…all of Washington…is doing life without parole.

The Honest Counterargument

You deserve the other side, so here it is…made as well as I can make it.

Fauci’s critics are not wrong that U.S. money reached a lab in Wuhan doing risky coronavirus work. They’re not wrong that EcoHealth failed to report things it was required to report. They’re not wrong that Fauci’s denials leaned on a technical definition…most Americans would not have understood the way he meant it.

They’re not wrong that the lab-leak hypothesis was treated as fringe…far longer than the evidence justified…and that some of that was reputational self-protection by scientists.

They’re not wrong that people’s lives were upended by decisions made fast…with bad data…by unelected officials…and that “we did our best” is cold comfort if you lost a business…or a year of your kid’s schooling.

All of that is fair. All of it deserves an accounting.

Here’s what none of it is: evidence of a crime by Anthony Fauci.

And…here’s the tell…if they had that, Wednesday would have looked completely different. You don’t scream profanity…at a witness you can convict. You just convict him.

What This Is Actually For

Six years. Multiple investigations. A criminal referral. A subpoena. A thousand pages of stolen diary.

And the deliverable…is a viral clip of a senator saying “fuck” to an octogenarian.

That’s not a failure. That’s the product.

Because here’s what happens if Fauci is a villain: nobody has to ask why the U.S. had one of the worst per-capita death tolls in the developed world. Nobody has to ask what the President was saying about bleach. Nobody has to ask why the country that spent the most got so little.

One man’s face is easier than a national autopsy.

And…there’s a second use…more dangerous…and I want you to see it clearly.

Every ounce of energy poured into destroying Fauci is a deposit in a much larger account: the account marked don’t trust the experts. Not these experts. Experts.

That account pays out later. It pays out the next time there’s a pandemic…and a scientist has to tell Americans something urgent and true…and they’ve spent six years learning that scientists are liars who deserve to be sworn at in the Senate.

The bill for Wednesday…doesn’t come due Wednesday.

What To Watch

One.

Whether the contempt vote actually happens…and whether it holds up. A contempt referral against a man asserting a constitutional privilege…in a hearing whose chairman has publicly promised to jail him…is not a strong case.

Two.

Whether Florida’s investigation produces an actual charge…or evaporates once the press cycle moves. Legal experts already called the theory far-fetched.

Three.

Whether anyone…anyone at all…releases a finding…rather than a clip.

Six years is a long time to be this angry…and this damn empty-handed.

Subscribe if you’d rather have the sorting than the shouting.

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#HoldFast

Back soon.

-Jack

Jack Hopkins

P.S. Moreno had an aide hand Fauci a pocket copy of the Constitution as a rebuke. The rebuke was for invoking the Fifth Amendment. Which is in the Constitution. Which was in the pamphlet. I have nothing to add to that.

P.P.S. If you want to argue with me on the gain-of-function section…do it. I mean that. It’s the part of this story where reasonable people…genuinely disagree…and I’d rather be corrected in the comments…than be wrong in print. But bring the grant language…not a clip.

Sources

Check me. All of it.

The hearing itself

• CNN, “Dr. Anthony Fauci repeatedly invokes the Fifth in dramatic Senate hearing about Covid pandemic” — July 29, 2026

• NBC News, “Anthony Fauci invokes Fifth Amendment, calls Rand Paul ‘unhinged’” — includes his stated reason: perjury exposure

• The Hill, “Moreno expletive Fauci hearing” — the pocket Constitution, and the exact quote

• Mediaite, “GOP Senator Goes Scorched on Fauci”

• YouTube, Moreno’s questioning, full clip — watch it yourself

The Fifth Amendment question — Hawley’s claim

• MS NOW, “The scope of Fauci’s Fifth Amendment invocation may have to be settled in court” — the key one. Why “you have no rights” oversimplifies a live legal fight, and why the January 2025 pardon cutoff matters.

• CNN, “Why Anthony Fauci might not be safe after pleading the Fifth” — Hawley’s full quote

• The Hill, “Fauci’s legal protection from pardon, Fifth Amendment is an open question” — the contempt vote

• Epoch Times, “What to Know About Fauci Pleading the Fifth” — a conservative outlet conceding the state-prosecution wrinkle. Worth reading precisely because it isn’t friendly.

Gain-of-function — read all of these before you argue with me

• FactCheck.org, “The Wuhan Lab and the Gain-of-Function Disagreement” — the definitional fight, laid out plainly

• FactCheck.org, “Fauci and Paul, Round 2” — no evidence he lied to Congress, and why

• National Review, “NIH Admits to Funding Gain-of-Function Research in Wuhan” — the strongest piece against my position. Tabak’s letter, the mice, EcoHealth’s reporting failures. I linked it on purpose.

The diary

• NPR, “Rand Paul releases Anthony Fauci’s pandemic-era diary notes. Here’s what they tell us”

• CBS News, “Fauci diaries touch on COVID origins and tense relationship with Trump” — the January 2020 “amplifier” entry, in context

• CNN, “Diary entries, a subpoena and an anticipated clash” — how the pages got to Paul, and Fauci’s lawyers’ letter

• The Hill, “Rand Paul releases over a thousand pages of Fauci’s diary entries”

Primary documents

Paul published the diary pages himself…via his committee’s document repository. If you’re going to have an opinion about what’s in a man’s journal…read the journal… not the thread summarizing it.