Former federal prosecutor Jim Trusty said Tuesday that former President Joe Biden’s preemptive pardon of former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) head Dr. Anthony Fauci could leave him vulnerable to committing perjury.
Biden preemptively pardoned Fauci, Gen. Mark Milley and the Jan. 6 committee members during the final hours of his presidency on Monday and said that they do not deserve to be “targets of unjustified and politically motivated prosecutions.” Trusty, on “Newsline,” said that Fauci’s history of “inconsistent statements” and the pardon’s removal of his Fifth Amendment privilege could lead to him exposing himself under questioning.
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“Fauci. I think the biggest danger for him at this point won’t be some sort of substantive crime. It would be false statements. I mean, he’s already given inconsistent statements over the years. So getting him to kind of rehash that could lead to some exposure,” Trusty said. “I’m not a huge fan of the substitute of like, perjury traps for actually substantive investigations. But … it’ll be interesting to see guys like Fauci, who have no Fifth Amendment privilege, having to endure some serious questioning.”
The pardon spans back to 2014, covering Fauci’s tenure as a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force and his time as chief medical advisor to Biden. Fauci has been accused of lying to Congress and evading FOIA Freedom of Information Act requests.
Fauci has said that COVID-19 was a “natural occurrence” and has refuted the possibility that the subawards his agency granted to the Wuhan Institute of Virology could have financed what originated the virus. Experts have suggested that Fauci perjured himself multiple times during his congressional testimony, including his assertion that it was impossible for the viruses he funded to have become COVID-19.
“The viruses that were studied under the subawards to the Wuhan Institute … those viruses were phylogenetically so far removed from SARS-CoV-2 that it is molecularly impossible for those viruses to have evolved from SARS COV2,” he testified to Congress in June.
Fauci also denied that his agency funded gain-of-function research, but experts have characterized this as a lie, saying the former NIAID head is obfuscating the definition of the controversial research.
(Featured Image Media Credit: Screenshot/Rumble/Newsmax)
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