President Trump on Wednesday responded to Dr. Anthony Fauci’s refusal to answer questions before the Senate Homeland Security Committee earlier, invoking his Fifth Amendment right more than 100 times as Senate Republicans grilled him over the COVID pandemic and his many lies.
Senator Rand Paul announced that the committee will vote next week to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci in contempt for refusing to answer questions and suggested that his invocation of the Fifth Amendment was unlawful.
Trump was asked whether he thinks Fauci should be held in contempt during a press conference at the White House. Trump did not comment on whether Fauci should face repercussions for his refusal to testify.
“Well, I watched the whole thing today, but more importantly, I was a part of the whole Fauci. I inherited Fauci. He was here from the 1980s, so I had him for a period of time, and I disagreed with him on a lot,” Trump said, noting that “I would have had to close down the whole country if I listened to him.”
“I went the Federalist way, which is basically let the governors decide, and generally speaking, the Republican governors did very well. The Democrat governors did not very well,” Trump continued.
“But Fauci wanted to have nobody wearing masks, if you remember, and then everybody had to wear five masks, as many masks as you could get. I mean, made a lot of mistakes, and he wasn’t a big factor for me. He was a very big factor for Biden, and if you remember, even though we were sort of prime time in terms of that whole disaster of COVID, far people died fewer in the Trump administration than in the Biden administration.”
Lindell TV’s Cara Castronuova then asked the President whether the DOJ should reopen the investigation into Biden’s autopen pardons to challenge their legitimacy. It can be recalled that Trump, in December, terminated all documents, executive orders, and contracts signed by Joe Biden’s autopen and declared them “null, void, and of no further force or effect.”
Trump on Wednesday noted that the pardon power is “the most powerful thing a president has.” He continued, “So, he was pardoned by Biden, and I respect that. I know how powerful it is.”
“The only thing I know that he signed was Hunter Biden’s pardon, but I’m not sure that he signed— he probably didn’t sign this one. So, I can’t tell you what the law is. I’ve heard that you have to have a lot of proof, you need to have letters, you need to have all sorts of things that the person operating the auto pen has to know exactly what it’s all about. He didn’t know what it was about,” Trump said.
“Maybe there’s something on the auto pen. Other than that, the power of pardon is very powerful.”
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Later, the President was asked why he thought Fauci refused to answer the Senate’s questions despite having a pardon.
“Look, I’ve never been a big fan of Fauci. Why he did that was very simple. His lawyer told him to,” he said.
“I don’t know if he would have been better off not doing it. There were a lot of questions that I guess he could have answered, and some maybe he didn’t feel comfortable answering, but his lawyer told him to do that.”
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