TMZ producer and journalist Harvey Levin said Dr. Anthony Fauci’s congressional hearing on Wednesday was “heartbreaking,” claiming members of Congress were on a “witch hunt.”
Levin shared his thoughts after Fauci, who is the former leader of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), declined to answer questions regarding the Chinese coronavirus pandemic at a Senate hearing.
“Watching Anthony Fauci before a congressional hearing and taking the Fifth Amendment is just one of the most heartbreaking things I have seen in government in my lifetime. This is something we need to reckon with, that I’m going to say up front, I have problems the way the CDC handled COVID,” Levin said:
That said, Anthony Fauci over a period of decades has been an amazing public servant. In the 80s, I had many friends who died of AIDS, a horrible, painful death. And I had friends who lived because of Anthony Fauci. Because he was willing to look at expiremental drugs in a different way than they had looked at them before and that really resulted in lives saved.
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Now we are at a point where members of congress and yes, you Rand Paul, are on a witch hunt. The best I can say for Rand Paul is that he’s being really honest. He has said now over a period of years he wants Anthony Fauci in a jail cell… that’s the point of this hearing. That’s why they’re doing this. They want to take something Anthony Fauci says and claim it amounts to perjury, and they want to prosecute him, they want to convict him, and they want to throw him in prison. That’s the point of this hearing. There is no other point of this hearing.
Levin added that no matter what Fauci might have said, “If you can prosecute somebody for fricking seashells on the beach shore, then you could certainly prosecute somebody for what they say in a congressional hearing, and that’s the climate we’re in. We are in a Senator Joseph McCarthy climate.”
Fauci took aim at Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) during the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing, which Paul chairs, according to Breitbart News.
“Under the advice of my attorneys, I will invoke my right under the 5th Amendment of the Constitution to refrain from answering your questions,” he said, adding:
Given Senator Paul’s obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution, his repeated slanderous comments about me, and recently his publicly releasing my unredacted personal diary aimed at embarrassing and intimidating me. The only conclusion I can reach is that the sole reason he is calling me before this Committee is to get me to say something that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, ‘behind bars.’
The outlet also reported that Fauci’s diary entries showed he publicly lied about the coronavirus’s fatality rate, privately admitted that scientists suspected the illness likely stemmed from a lab leak even though he publicly claimed that was a conspiracy theory, and also had an obsession with his popularity during the pandemic.
In a social media post following the hearing, Paul wrote “Although Fauci didn’t say much today, we’ve learned a whole lot about the truth he hid behind closed doors and in his diary. It’s not over.”
More video showed lawmakers grilling the doctor:
President Donald Trump said he watched Fauci’s hearing and noted he was “never a big fan” of his, according to Breitbart News.
“I inherited Fauci. He was here from the 1980s, so I had him for a period of time, and I disagreed with him a lot. I would have had to close down the whole country if I listened to him,” Trump said, adding “I went the federalist way, which is basically let the governors decide, and generally speaking, the Republican governors did very well; the Democrat governors did not do very well.”