Anthony Fauci strolled into a Senate hearing on Tuesday and proceeded to invoke his Fifth Amendment rights more than 100 times, which is honestly impressive stamina for a guy who supposedly has nothing to hide. But according to USA Journal, his marathon of silence may have accidentally given the Trump Justice Department exactly the legal ammunition it needed to challenge every pardon Biden's team cranked out on the way to the exit.
Let's talk about the autopen situation, because this is where things get truly wild. During Biden's final weeks in office, his staff reportedly churned out dozens of pardons, many of them signed by a machine rather than by the actual President of the United States. You know, the guy the Constitution specifically entrusts with clemency power. Fauci's pardon landed on January 19, 2025, covering "any offenses" connected to his NIH work stretching all the way back to January 2014. That's a pretty generous hall pass for someone who claims he did nothing wrong.
Here's the constitutional pickle nobody has bothered to test until now: can a robot arm legally forgive your crimes? A pardon is supposed to be a deeply personal exercise of presidential authority, not something a staffer feeds through a signature machine while the boss is elsewhere doing who knows what. If Biden never personally reviewed or comprehended what was being stamped with his name, the legal argument that these pardons are invalid is apparently not some crackpot theory. Legal experts say it carries real weight.
Fauci makes himself the ideal candidate for this showdown because he is the most recognizable person who received one of these blanket pardons. His pandemic era conduct, including allegations about misleading Congress on gain of function research, destroyed federal records, and diary entries suggesting he was more focused on his celebrity status than public health, gives prosecutors plenty of substantive material to work with.
Senator Josh Hawley from Missouri pointed out the obvious legal trap Fauci walked right into. If the pardon is valid, then Fauci faces zero criminal jeopardy, which means the Fifth Amendment does not apply because there is literally nothing to incriminate himself about. So he cannot plead the Fifth. If the committee holds him in contempt and the DOJ prosecutes that contempt charge, Fauci's attorneys would immediately try to get the case thrown out by citing the pardon. And boom, suddenly a federal judge has to decide whether a machine signed pardon from a president who was, by all documented accounts, not fully cogent actually counts.
A former senior Justice Department prosecutor reportedly told journalist Catherine Herridge that there are three viable legal strategies for challenging Biden's preemptive pardons, though none of them are simple.
So Biden's final presidential act was shielding his allies with what amounts to a mechanical rubber stamp. And Fauci, by refusing to answer questions more than a hundred times in a single sitting, may have just drawn the perfect treasure map for Trump's DOJ to challenge every single one of those pardons in court. Sometimes the best offense is your opponent's defense.
Read more conservative news commentary at: USA Journal News
