Trump says he was busy Wednesday morning watching entire three-hour-plus Fauci Senate grilling

The President of the United States admitted to spending three hours of his morning watching one of his Covid-era political nemeses repeatedly invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination during a contentious Senate hearing, seemingly shirking more pressing matters such as the war with Iran he started five months earlier.President Donald Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Wednesday that he’d taken in the entirety of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s appearance before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee when pressed on whether the retired immunologist should face consequences for declining to answer questions from Kentucky Senator Rand Paul and other Republicans who’ve expressed a desire to see him imprisoned for a range of fantastical reasons.

“I watched the whole thing today,” Trump said. Fauci, who served as NIAID’s director from 1984 until December 2022 and played key roles in American efforts to combat HIV, Ebola, Swine Flu and Covid-19 during that time, appeared before the GOP-led panel as part of Senator Paul’s long-running push to validate what were considered at the time to be fringe, partisan theories about the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic and the best treatments to combat the coronavirus.Though enjoyed a sterling reputation in and out of government when he became a prominent member of Trump’s Coronavirus Task Force during the last year of the president’s first term, he quickly became a hate object for Republicans after his medical advice contradicted Trump’s sunny pronouncements about the progress of America’s fight against the pandemic.

In a brief statement before the panel, he cited Paul’s years-long “obvious obsession” with seeing him prosecuted as well as the Kentuckian’s “repeated slanderous comments about me, and recently, his publicly releasing my personal diary aimed at embarrassing and intimidating me.”He accused Paul, an eye surgeon by training with no infectious disease expertise, of summoning him before the committee to induce him to “say something, anything, that can vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up in his words, quote, ‘behind bars’” before telling senators he would decline to answer questions on the advice of his attorney.More follows...

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