Rand Paul won't get the Tony Fauci probe he wanted
Sen. Rand Paul has spent two years battling with Tony Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, on all manner of covid policies — on social distancing, on the need for vaccines, on whether Fauci should get to keep his job.
The Kentucky Republican even campaigned on a promise to “fire Fauci,” prompting the octogenarian doctor to hit back at one hearing this year.
Paul also promised voters: if Republicans won back the Senate, he would become a committee chairman and oversee a major probe into Fauci’s work, as my colleague Rachel Roubein and I wrote earlier this month:
“If you help me win, I promise to subpoena every last document of Dr. Fauci’s unprecedented coverup,” said a Paul fundraising email sent Oct. 20, referring to Paul’s allegations that Fauci contributed to the virus’s creation by funding research in Wuhan, China — allegations Fauci has categorically denied.
But Fauci announced he would retire this year, conveniently before the prospect of GOP congressional control. And in the latest twist, it’s still not clear whether Republicans will control any chamber of Congress, with Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) projected to retain her seat and Democrats hanging onto the Senate … and the party having a narrow path to keep control of the House too.
Americans tend to think about congressional control through lenses like policy and personnel — how it affects the ability to get legislation done, for instance. And following the news of Cortez Masto’s re-election, much of the immediate coverage on Saturday night was about President Biden’s ability to make judicial appointments in a Democrat-led Senate.
But a major piece of congressional control is the ability to conduct oversight, and for two years, Democrats in control of Congress have led probes into the Trump administration’s covid response, a series of reports and hearings that exposed myriad problems.
I’d spoken to multiple Biden health officials who said they were expecting Republicans to win back Congress and conduct their own covid probes into CDC recommendations, how billions of dollars in funding was spent and other sensitive areas — a possibility, if not a probability, that has hung over Biden’s health team for months.
Fauci told me back in March that he was bracing for the GOP to retake Congress and hold a series of high-profile investigations into his work.
“It’s Benghazi hearings all over again,” Fauci said, referring to the GOP-led investigations of Hillary Clinton’s leadership of the State Department during the 2012 attacks on U.S. compounds in Libya. That long-running investigation found no new evidence of wrongdoing by Clinton but was a staple of conservative media for years.
“They’ll try to beat me up in public, and there’ll be nothing there,” Fauci added. “But it will distract me from doing my job, the way it’s doing right now.”
Again, control of the House isn’t settled, and there could still be a series of GOP-led probes into Fauci and other government officials next year. (My colleague Rachel has a list of potential House GOP covid probes here.)
But no GOP Senate means no Chairman Rand Paul. And that also means that a series of made-for-TV clashes between Paul and Fauci — which some conservatives were hoping to see in the lead-up to the 2024 elections — is likely cancelled before it can begin.