Fauci Under Oath: The Bureaucratic Lies Unraveling | Victor Davis Hanson

I like the reference to bureaucrats, because I was watching Fauci's clip, they're airing it this morning. And they have all these clips where he said, under no circumstances, this is absurd, I couldn't, it's impossible. We did not aid or fund gain in function research. And we know now that he was giving money to Peter Daszak to do just that. And then we learned that he had a pardon exemption for 10 years of undefined behaviors. And Rand Paul said, the only person that's ever had a blanket pardon like that, without specifying anything they've done wrong, just you can't go back for 10 years and look at anything they've done is Hunter Biden. And then he said, he was looking at it to see whether this was an auto-pin pardon via, you know, an aid. He was actually suggesting, Jack, that Joe Biden hadn't reviewed the history of Fauci and was not intimate with the details and therefore did not make that decision. But Fauci, I think, is going to be in trouble because they're going to ask him again, under oath, did you or did you not engage in gain in function research? Or did you aid, fund, help, send instrumentation or expertise to Wuhan for that type of research? If he lies now in 2026, he's not exempt. So I would imagine that he would say something like, I misunderstood the question. Yes, some people might interpret what I did as that. That's what he'll probably try to say, but I don't think he'll deny it. Because he's the science. I don't know how he can misinterpret anything, so. I mean, they've got his email. So if he denies it, they'll call him up for perjury. That his name is on a building at Holy Cross, our mutual alma mater, is just, whatever. All right. So Victor, you mentioned J.D. Vance and the great editor and boss of the Daily Signal, Rob Louie, folks, just one of the nicest men on the planet. He asked me if I would pose this to you. And this is about J.D. Vance comparing himself to Richard Nixon in the Wall Street Journal articles. Vance compared himself to former President Richard Nixon, minimized the scandal that took down the disgraced president decades ago, saying the theft and cover-up wouldn't end a presidency if it happened in today's vast moving news cycle. If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be a 12-hour news story, the vice president said on Thursday at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda. The idea that it would take down a presidency is crazy. Vance likened himself to Nixon, who resigned in 1974 after he lost support of Congress over the scandal. Young senator, vice president, writes some best-selling books, is hated by the media. It sounds like J.D. Vance. I always liked Richard Nixon. Any of your thoughts on J.D. Vance with this, Nixon comparison, or anything else related to him? Well, I think it's pretty clear that Nixon didn't know about the original break-in. These were kind of fanatics at the RNC. And John Dean and all of these people were involved, and they turned state's evidence. So, anyway, I lost... Sorry. Oh, can you... Let me start again. It's pretty clear that he did not... Richard Nixon did not start know of the original break-in to the DNC. But it did... His underlings were involved, once they heard about it, to contain it rather than to expose it. And at some point, he was aware of the effort to not be completely truthful about it. Now, as we know, we have a lot of presidents have not been... Bill Clinton was impeached, not convicted, but impeached for lying under... And he was also prosecuted for lying under oath and disbarred. But, in any case, Nixon... What Watergate did was it nullified... How do I say it? It nullified the 72 election, which was, I think, the largest popular vote, not the electoral vote, the largest popular vote victory in history. It was 60... I don't mean in history, but in modern history, going way back. I don't know, Benjamin Harris... It was a heinie kicking, a big turn. It was 60.8 of the popular vote, slightly more than LBJ got over, I think. I'm just doing this by memory. So, here you have this... The people have spoken. And then, a year later, the press is going wild. And Deep Throat, we know, was now... Mark Feld, I think it was, he was a disaffected FBI agent that didn't get the position that he wanted. And there's been some suggestion that a lot of stuff in all the president's men was on source. Is that a polite word? Kind of exaggerated or they editorialized. They didn't really talk to people who said that, and they couldn't document that. But that said, Nixon knew that he should have just come out and said this is... But the tragedy of it was, in 72, we had the Vietnam War. It was stable. By early, mid-73, there was the peace talks. And Nixon had said again and again, if you break the peace, air power is going to destroy you, to the North Vietnamese. And so, what happened during Watergate, he was so hemorrhaging that they, being the Democrats, 17 times, they cut off aid to Vietnam. So, all of that work, all that death was just handed over. Pete 15,000-plus dead Americans. Pete And then, worse yet, the Arabs and the Russians believe that by October 73, he would fire the Attorney General by the Friday night massacre, supposedly. He would be so weakened that he either would not respond, or he would not help Israel. So, there was a sense that U.S. had lost deterrence. I think after they, you know, they tried to really destroy him as a person, and well, I'm not trying to defend him, what he did, but what I'm trying to say is that I think what they did was disproportionate. There had been a way, if he had said to the people, and he did say he'd made mistakes, and he didn't know exactly what was going on, but when it was going on, he should have fired everybody and been more, he could have survived. Pete But the media at that point, Bob Woodward was a hero. Pete He was never to be forgiven for the chambers, his affair, and the central role he played in keeping that alive, and it still resonates 80 years later. Pete He was Ike's bad cop for eight years. Ike was a good cop, and Nixon took on everybody, and he was involved in the whole McCarthy thing, and they never forgave him for that. They hated Nixon. Nixon was in some ways a tragic empathetic character because he was very bright. He was a Quaker. He came from California, from a lower middle class, middle class family. He was a very good poker player in the Navy, very smart guy, completely self-made, and the aristocracy, which at that time was a euphemism for the Kennedys, that left-wing liberal aristocracy whose transgressions just dwarfed Nixon's. I mean, Nixon never took it, never had sex with a staffer, and then went out on a bridge, and drove the car into the water, and then swam, and let the girl die for 30 minutes of asphyxiation, and then cooked up a scheme to lie about it.