In the near term, the headaches Biden’s maneuver will produce will likely be exclusive to his fellow Democrats. This scheme is likely to backfire.
Joe Biden and his subordinates pulled the trigger on a precedent-setting series of preemptive pardons for offenses not yet alleged. It matters not that the recipients of this relief are frequent targets of criticism from Donald Trump — there is no justification for this abuse of the pardon power, as Democrats once readily acknowledged. The very notion of a blanket, preemptive pardon alters the terms of engagement in Washington in ways the civic-minded will all but certainly regret.
But that’s a headache for another year. In the near term, the headaches Biden’s maneuver will produce will likely be exclusive to his fellow Democrats. This scheme could backfire. Not only does this edict do Trump’s work for him by implicitly assigning criminal intent to the Biden administration’s allies, but it also provides Republicans in Congress with avenues to exploit.
As Andy McCarthy has long fretted, we cannot presuppose that Biden’s most controversial pardons — a category that now includes most of his immediate family — are fueled by prudential considerations alone. The Biden White House is likely also seeking to frustrate or thwart altogether congressional investigations into its conduct. But as Andy also observed, accepting a presidential pardon “immunizes” individuals against the ability to invoke their fifth amendment rights. “If a pardon had been accepted, a recipient would not be able to plead ‘the fifth’ because there would be no threat of incrimination,” Newsweek’s summary reads.
Dr. Anthony Fauci is one of the recipients of Biden’s preemptive pardons. And although he has made himself available to congressional committees investigating his role during the pandemic and has never invoked his Fifth Amendment rights, congressional Republicans may not have left a few stones unturned.
In late September of last year, the House Oversight Committee revealed that it had subpoenaed National Institutes of Health’s Margaret Moore, who it alleged was “involved in a conspiracy” to teach people within Fauci’s office “how to evade the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and avoid public transparency related to the COVID-19 pandemic,” including destroying documents. The committee also revealed that Moore would decline to testify and invoke her right against self-incrimination.
The subterfuge in which Moore, aka “FOIA lady,” engaged was known when Fauci last testified before Congress in June. There, lawmakers probed him about the extent of his relationship with Dr. David Morens, who discussed how he made “emails disappear after” they were sought through a Freedom of Information Act request. Fauci said he “knew nothing of Dr. Moren’s actions,” and he maintained that he could not recall using his personal email account to conduct public business (Morens’ claim in one email that he could connect researchers to Fauci “through a backchannel” notwithstanding).
The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic’s final report released last month expands on the number of people in Fauci’s orbit who sought to evade oversight. Greg Folkers, Fauci’s former chief of staff, “misspelled keywords so they wouldn’t be flagged in FOIA searches.” Folkers would write “Ec~Health,” “g#in-of-function research,” and “anders$n” — as in Kristian Andersen, a co-author of a report rejecting the notion that Covid-19 was a byproduct of gain-of-function research — to frustrate investigators, Emily Kopp reported.
Fauci has repeatedly denied that the NIH supported research of that kind at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but the select committee maintains that the doctor’s testimony “was, at a minimum, misleading.” The authors contend that “a plain reading of EcoHealth’s research conducted at the WIV using U.S. taxpayer dollars confirm it facilitated an experiment that conveyed new or enhanced activity to a pathogen—thus, satisfying the definition of gain-of-function research.”
“While we remain frustrated with Dr. Fauci’s inability to recollect COVID-19 information that is important for our investigation, others we have spoken to do recall the facts,” Oversight chairman Brad Wenstrup sighed following two days of hearings with Fauci last year. “There are many opportunities to do better in the future,” he concluded. Indeed, given all these new details and Fauci’s immunized status, we should hear from him again quite soon.