"A Huge Scandal": Matt Taibbi Reacts to Fauci’s Shocking Congressional Silence

This episode is brought to you by Claude by Anthropic. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough. It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you. Whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move, Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter and finds connections you might have missed. For problems worth solving, get started at clod.a.ai slash Spotify. This episode is brought to you by San Pellegrino Chau. A gift from Italy to your home. San Pellegrino Chau is a flavored sparkling water made with real fruit juice, finished with a pinch of Sicilian salt for a perfectly balanced taste. So which flavor will you choose? Peach, lime, blood orange, cherry, or maybe the all-new limoncello. Crafted in Italy with zero grams of added sugar, San Pellegrino Chow. Buy it now. Fouchy wasted our time for two hours. He takes the fifth, but it doesn't mean we didn't learn anything from his testimony. And the answers may lie with his staffers who could be coming up next. With me now, though, is Matt Taibi Matt. We talked before he testified. I didn't really think he was going to take the fifth. Did it surprise you? Absolutely. I had talked to a number of former officials the day before. Everybody speculated about what he might do, not one person that I talked to thought he was going to invoke on the stand. That was a dramatic moment, I thought, which is not terribly common in Congress. And it ought to be. a moment that propels everybody in the direction of investigating what happened with the pandemic. But it doesn't look like that's going to happen. No, I mean, we discussed this too. You know, after the laptop is real, no one believed it. Anyone who wrote tweeted that, had their account taken offline. And then the Russia hoax. Everyone knows Russia colluded with the president to win. It turns out that didn't happen. The people got awards for writing those stories about that. And then you have a situation where Joe Biden's mental declined. No one acknowledged it. We were seeing it. every day until he was eliminated in June. And then people like Jake Tapper made millions of dollars in writing a book about it while ignoring it. You would think that everyone would learn play it straight, but they're not. Lawmakers are playing politics. But for the most part, did you see much on any other outlet about Anthony Fauci and what a fraudy is? Not only did I not see that, but if you look at the New York Times this morning, you'll see Rand Paul compared to Joe McCarthy for his interrogation of Anthony Fauci. So the legend, you have to remember how extreme Anthony Fauci Mania became in 2020 and 2021. You know, you had a cold open with Brad Pitt playing Anthony Fauci. You had Joan Baez writing love letters to him, celebrity serenating him at his birthday. He became.

a sex symbol improbably. And that image will not die. People see him as a kind of anti-Trump religious figure. When Trump is really not relevant to this whole story, they should have been investigating the science. Yeah, I really. I mean, just like, let's just look at what we know. Don't wear masks, wear a mask, six feet away. I never told you to stay six feet away. There's countless examples of them saying you got to stay six feet apart. It stopped anyone from going back to school that wasn't a private or charter school. And then you have the situation when to come to the vaccine. If you take the vaccine, you're not going to get it. You don't have to wear a mask. Everyone started getting sick again. I told you to wear a mask. Then you got to wear it outdoors. You don't have to wear it outdoors. You better not have Christmas. You better not have Hanukkah. At the same time, he's one sitting in the stands without a mask on. He's the one now going out to dinner with you. Tapper and while calling Chris Andrew Cuomo after his show to say, hey, do you need any help? How can I help you while showing Barbara Streisand how to work in Alexa? So this is unbelievable. This guy should be the laughing stock of the country. Well, not only the laughing stock, though, I mean, Brian, I mean, he, I see all of that as a ruse to deflect attention from the real issue, which is how did this bat virus, which can infect bat viruses, by the way. How did it come to have this fur and cleavage site, this extremely rare collection of nucleotides, inserted into its genome to make it highly transmissible to human beings while it's discovered just miles away from an institute that's doing that exact kind of research funded by the United States? We have to figure out... the exact sequence of events that led to that. And his stonewalling yesterday isn't going to prevent that, but it should be a warning shot to the press that, look, this is going to end up blowing up in the faces of all of you folks. Might as well just look into this thing. You would think, you know, laptop is real. We just stopped talking about it. The Russia hoax didn't happen. We just stopped talking about it. And then you have a situation where President Trump is president again. And now we're looking back. And we're also seeing the whole thing with the vaccine. I wonder about what do you think. If President Trump had won re-election, do you think it would have been the exact opposite? Republicans took the vaccine and the Democrats would say it kills people? I think that's entirely possible. There was evidence for that. Remember, both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris talked about their hesitancy to accept any vaccine that had been recommended by Donald Trump.

This is really the key dynamic about the whole COVID story. Whatever Donald Trump said that the press assumed the opposite was true, which is, you know, they accused to him of being unscientific, which in some cases I think he was, right? He rushed, he jumped a gun. But the press wasn't any more scientific and saying just because Donald Trump says this means it's wrong. So when he said. You know, we don't see that it's affecting children. That was true. And as a result, we had lockdowns in schools for much longer than we needed to. And the six feet apart. And the six feet apart and all this stuff. And we didn't look into the gain of function stuff. So here's what Dr. Burke said. And she's famously with their scarfs working with Anthony Fauci. And she saw politics all over this. Cut five. There were solutions. But it became very political. And we all have to be aware, because it was a presidential election year, it was really important for blue states to show that they were taking it very seriously. And they overclosed. And we just have to be honest that that happened. And that's why that discussion from both sides of the aisle and a resolution and a way to go forward is critical so that we can do this right in the future. So, I mean, obviously, and then they wouldn't open up. Matt, they wouldn't open up the schools. These kids were forever harmed. Was your family directly affected? A little bit, yeah. I mean, look, my kids were home for an awful long time. If I didn't love hanging out with my kids, I'd probably be angry, more angry about it. But, you know, it was completely unnecessary. It put a tremendous strain on families all over the country. But more than that, it heightened the mass hysteria about this disease and kept people from looking at the real issue. If there had been more... effort at protecting people in the older age group, then we probably would have had fewer deaths. Instead, there was this relentless propaganda about vaccination and no other information at all. And that really hurt people. Absolutely. So the other thing is, so I looked at the questions. I thought, can you get anything out of this? And you can. I did not know that he made nine separate staffers, fill out applications to apply for awards. He got a million dollars. Shouldn't be doing that. Number two is his assistant deleted a ton of information. Now they're going to probably bring his assistant in, put that person under oath to find out what did you delete? I mean, imagine the 1100 page diary, how damning that looks, how much he was saying something privately and is something different publicly. Can you imagine what he deleted? Oh, it boggles the mind to imagine. Unfortunately, you can't concretely speculate, but it would have to have been something that was not flattering or salutary for him. But certainly, just looking at the diaries, they're enormously damaging. They show that he had real information. For instance, about...

you know, the possibility of genetic engineering and or the links to the laboratory. And he held that back. You didn't tell the president, didn't tell the public, didn't tell Congress. I mean, all this stuff is terrible. In a normal media environment, this would be a huge scandal. This episode is brought to you by Claude by Anthropic. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough. It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you. Whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move, Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter and finds connections you might have missed. For problems worth solving, get started at clod.a.i slash Spotify. This episode is brought to you by San Pellegrino Chau. A gift from Italy to your home. San Pellegrino Chau is a flavored sparkling water made with real fruit juice, finished with a pinch of Sicilian salt for a perfectly balanced taste. So which flavor will you choose? Peach, lime, blood orange, cherry, or maybe the all-new limoncello. Crafted in Italy with zero grams of added sugar, San Pellegrino Chow. Buy it now. Here's what Rand Paul said that he learned later that day after the testimony was over. Cut nine. We also found that he got a million dollar award, but that he used the work of eight government workers to fill out the paperwork for an award, that he got them to nominate him, that he was discussing with people, hey, nominate me for this prize. And if it has to go through ethics, let's make sure we get the money. And everybody, make sure we try to get to yes on that I can keep the money. A million dollar prize is inappropriate for government scientists. It's inappropriate for government bureaucrats. to use government workers to do it. So even though he didn't testify, I think we learned a lot about him. We learned a lot about his decision-making process. And really, we learned a lot about the things we need to try not to do again. Yeah, and hire him. And basically, he was doing policy by interview. But what about the Democrats? Andy Kim, I apologize by the way you're being treated. I want to salute you for all your help. Senator Richard Blumenthal, you've done a great job. These guys just don't want to examine Donald Trump's ethics problems. That one Democrat, even John Fetterman came out and said, look, I was lieutenant governor. I'm still examining what I did. Wonder if I did anything wrong would be great if you would examine something that you might have done wrong.

It's unbelievable. And as you point out, it's a parallel to every other scandal beforehand. I mean, when I testified in Congress, I was privately going to the Democrats and saying, you know, look, this is not a partisan issue. This affects both sides. let's not make it into that. And they didn't want to look at the issue because they thought it redounded poorly for Democrats. This is the same thing. They just think that this is a bad issue for them. So they don't want to look at something that could have catastrophic impact the next time. I mean, the next virus is not going to be harmless to children, most likely. And we're going to have a much more devastating impact. And because we're not investigating this now or as much as we could. you know, they're all going to be guilty in the future. Matt, how did this overlap with which you discovered on X when you were allowed to go in there after Elon Musk bought it? So of the Twitter files reporters, I probably knew the least about COVID when we went in. But in the process of looking at the documents, we found. One of the major things that we discovered is that the platforms were not only taking direct direction from the CDC, the NIH, the Sergeant General's office, but also that they were censoring by narrative and not so much by individual facts. So, for instance, they would be, if you had a true story about... somebody who died after they got the vaccine, that could be a true story, but they would say that promoted hesitancy and they would take that down or de-amplify it. And so this was a radical change in how platforms looked at the whole problem of regulating content. They wanted to align content with the Biden administration's policies. And so as a result, people didn't get good information, either about the vaccine or about the virus. Also, I remember Ron Johnson had that forum about Ivermectin about that being working, and they took it down. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.. had his account suspended because he doubted about the vaccine and he doubted a lot of these policies. I mean, it's amazing how that overlapped with the political process. Yeah, and there was no reason for that either, right? Like, why denigrate, you know, a possible cure for what's going on or a possible treatment? Early on, there was no reason to think that Ivermectin couldn't have some possible, you know, important benefit. And there were a lot of doctors that I talked to who were not Republicans. They weren't conservatives who said, yeah, this is working for my patients, but, you know, I don't. I'm getting a lot of flack for trying to get it to people. And the platforms did the same thing. They just assumed out of hand because it was, you know, popular in conservative media that it had to be wrong. And, yeah, there were studies that didn't show a lot. But.

There was no reason to take down the speculation. There was no reason to punish people for asking about it. All of that happened. And when you, we only have 30 seconds, but when you testified, the IRS was knocking at your door, weren't they? They were, yeah. And, you know, all we were trying to do is tell people that, hey, this is happening. Your accounts are being censored. And, you know, we were treated like public enemies for that. It was, it was really, you know, boggled the mind. You got to look up. I mean, go on YouTube and lock Matt testimony. It was absolutely a circus. But you wouldn't play into it. You did a great job. Matt, thanks so much. Appreciate it. Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. Now, I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of Unlimited Premium Wireless for $15 a month is back. So I thought it would be fun if we made $15 bills. But it turns out that's very illegal. So there goes my big idea for the commercial. Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. Up front payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for 12-month plan required. $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy. See terms.