Anthony Fauci took the Fifth Amendment dozens of times before a Senate committee last week rather than answer questions about the policies that shuttered your churches, closed your schools, and bankrupted your businesses — and the same establishment that canonized him is hoping you won't notice.

You should notice. Fauci sat before Senator Rand Paul's committee and, when Senator Ron Johnson asked whether he had "literally lie[d] to your own diary," the 85-year-old who once charmed the nation fell back on a familiar refrain: "On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer, based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution." He repeated it for three hours, according to the New Yorker's account of the hearing. The man who demanded unquestioning compliance from every American invoked the very constitutional protection he denied the rest of us when he backed lockdowns, mask mandates, and church closures.

Fauci's diary — more than a thousand pages of notes, articles, and internet memes, retrieved from a government computer at the direction of RFK Jr., who now oversees the agency Fauci once ran — reveals something uglier than bad judgment. It reveals a man obsessed with silencing dissent. As HotAir's Stephen Moore reports, Fauci wrote in his diary that he urged President Trump to "shut up Stephen Moore and stop his publication of 'Dr. Wrong' paper." Moore had been making the case to reopen the economy in April 2020, and Fauci wanted him muzzled. The First Amendment was apparently negotiable. The Fifth, less so.

Then there is the record. Fauci spent 38 years at NIAID and, as Moore documented, was wrong about heterosexual AIDS in the 1980s, wrong about avian flu in the early 2000s, wrong about Zika — routinely overestimating fatalities by five to ten times the actual numbers. A palm reader would have had better accuracy. But every wrong prediction inflated his budget, expanded his authority, and made him indispensable to the political class that needed a scientist to justify their power grabs.

The lab-leak question — the one Fauci won't answer under oath — remains unresolved. The Wuhan Institute of Virology received NIAID funding through a nonprofit sub-grant. Some of its work involved developing new coronavirus variants. Fauci has favored the natural-origin theory; the lab-leak theory, once dismissed as conspiracy, is now taken seriously by intelligence agencies. Fauci called Paul's pursuit an "unhinged obsession" and his questions "slanderous." But if the questions are so unhinged, why not just answer them under oath?

Joe Biden preemptively pardoned Fauci in January 2025 for any federal crimes related to his public service. That pardon does not shield him from state prosecution or perjury charges. Paul says he will pursue a contempt of Congress charge. The establishment, for its part, hung Fauci's portrait in the National Portrait Gallery and still invites him to give commencement addresses — as HotAir noted, one wonders if they've reserved wall space for Benedict Arnold too.

The man who told you to trust the science now refuses to answer basic questions about it under oath. The Fifth Amendment is his shield. It was never yours.