Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity News,
Dr. Anthony Fauci just refused a private transcribed interview with Sen. Ron Johnson's subcommittee. The same week, a former ABC News correspondent revealed that the network gutted a 2021 Wuhan lab leak investigation after the script was sent to Fauci for review.
The pattern is unmistakable. Stonewall. Censor. Invoke privilege. Repeat.
On Friday, Fauci's attorney notified Sen. Ron Johnson that the former NIAID director would not appear for a closed-door, transcribed interview as part of the ongoing investigation into the failed COVID response.
Johnson laid it out plainly:
"Dr. Fauci's attorney has just notified us that Fauci refuses to appear for a private transcribed interview. The American people deserve answers to legitimate questions regarding our miserably failed response to COVID-19. Some of those questions can only be answered by Dr. Fauci. He arrogantly once stated that he was 'very happy to testify before any congressional oversight committee. I have nothing to hide.' Apparently, he has a lot to hide. Since Fauci refuses to talk about his role and decisions related to COVID-19, my Subcommittee will continue to obtain his records and request to speak with key individuals that he worked with. We will explore our legal options before deciding our next steps."
This comes days after the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee voted along party lines to hold Fauci in contempt for his July 29 performance, where he invoked the Fifth Amendment roughly 112 times.
Fauci's lawyer responded to Johnson's request by claiming any effort to compel his appearance would "impermissibly harass or degrade Dr. Fauci for political purposes."
The AP reported the decline, noting it followed the partisan contempt vote and the earlier hearing in which Fauci repeatedly declined to answer questions about pandemic decisions, origins, and funding.
The contempt referral is already heading toward the Justice Department. Sen. Rand Paul has argued the Biden preemptive pardon removed any legitimate basis for the Fifth Amendment claims, leaving Fauci with no shield against answering.
While Fauci ducks the Senate, a separate bombshell landed from inside the media machine that once amplified him.
Former ABC News senior national correspondent Terry Moran, speaking on The Fifth Column podcast, described what happened to his early 2021 Nightline investigation into the COVID lab-leak theory.
Moran said the piece examined evidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had received Chinese military funding - something the lab's "Bat Lady" Shi Zhengli had denied. He and his team laid out the arguments.
Then the review hit.
"The day it was supposed to air, it gets 'reviewed.' It comes back to me...I was told: FAUCI," Moran stated.
He added that he was "absolutely livid," cursing in the booth as the final product arrived "incomprehensible," loaded with caveats and legalized language that stripped the original work of meaning.
"I've never watched that story [again] and I never want to. Because it wasn't mine, and most importantly, because it was incomprehensible."
He was told the script had gone to lawyers, standards - and Fauci.
This was not a conservative activist speaking. Moran is a longtime network journalist. His account directly undercuts years of media insistence that questions about the lab were fringe conspiracy theories while Fauci and allies worked to shut them down.
These latest refusals and revelations sit atop a mountain of prior evidence already documented.
Secret texts recovered from Fauci's government iPhone showed him privately warning in January 2021 that the second COVID vaccine dose "theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester" because of cytokine storms and fever. Publicly, he and other officials pushed the shots for pregnant women with no such caveats.
Emails previously released by Sen. Rand Paul showed Fauci instructing then-NIH Director Francis Collins to "read it, then destroy it" - language Paul has called a violation of federal records law.
At the July 29 hearing itself, Fauci offered an opening statement accusing Paul of an "unhinged obsession," then refused nearly every substantive question.
CNN legal analysts noted that the 112 Fifth Amendment pleas likely made his position worse, given the pardon removed criminal jeopardy and left him exposed to contempt.
The American people watched schools shuttered, businesses destroyed, and dissent crushed while the same officials privately fretted about risks they would not acknowledge publicly.
Now the central figure in that response continues to refuse basic questions under oath or in transcribed interviews, and a network reporter has confirmed that even internal journalistic work was routed through him for approval.
Johnson's subcommittee says it will keep pursuing records and other witnesses. The contempt referral sits with the Justice Department. The lab-leak story that was sanitized in 2021 is no longer radioactive. Accountability is no longer optional.
Fauci had years of unmatched power and media deference. That time is over.
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