The President says Fauci’s conduct was “far more serious than a lot of crimes.” But the word he attached to prosecuting it was “maybe.”
📌 ABOUT THIS SERIES
On the Advice of Counsel™ is an ongoing series on the July 29, 2026 Fauci hearing where Dr. Anthony Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times. Start with this post, or jump to any installment from the Series Hub (Index) →Watch the full hearing: YouTube · C-SPAN · Senate Committee page
“On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution.” Anthony Fauci’s 21 words repeated 111 times during “The Testimony of Anthony Fauci” - U.S. Senate, July 29, 2025.
We don’t know what the Justice Department will do. That’s the point of this installment. Let’s write down the Bannon-Navarro standard now, while the answer is still unknown, because a standard announced after the fact is not a genuine standard; it is a post hoc rationalization. It would be like Dr. Fauci pleading the Fifth 111 times and then announcing that silence is the standard for cooperation.
So here it is, in advance.
Watch what Fauci actually did on July 29, because the legal arguments somewhat obscure it.
He did not just decline to answer questions about gain-of-function funding. He declined to answer questions about the color of the carpet. About his tie. About the day of the week. And about his lifelong phobias related to cockroach sprays.
Sen. Josh Hawley made the point plainly: an invocation that covers the tie you are wearing is not tailored to anything. It is a posture adopted before the questions were asked.
And a posture is a statement. It says: I do not have to be here for the American people in any meaningful sense. You may convene, and subpoena, and swear me in, and I will sit in this chair and give you nothing, and there is nothing you can do about it.
That is not the behavior of a man mounting a defense. It is the behavior of a man who has done the arithmetic with his attorneys and thinks he knows the answer.
On his podcast the evening of the hearing, evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein put it in a frame worth sitting with. He is not describing the law. He is describing what he watched.
Weinstein’s characterization is that Fauci behaved like a made man — someone whose protection is structural rather than legal, who does not need to argue because he cannot be reached. What Weinstein saw in that chair, he said, was a flex.
And a question underneath it is another right question, and it is not rhetorical:
Why is this presumably sociopathic humanoid free?
Six years. Three administrations. Dozens of hearings. And finally, the auto-penned preemptive pardon generated by acolytes of demented Joe Biden. Not one legal consequence.
Either nothing happened worth prosecuting, or Weinstein’s correct and the machinery doesn’t reach Fauci, nor the other operatives at the upper tiers of the Global Power Pyramid, including the Biomedical Deep State. Those are the only two options. The kleptocratic line: “Nothing to see here. Move right along” or “It’s the machinery, people!” The referral now sitting at the Justice Department will tell us which.
This is the part that makes the test clean.
Steve Bannon was charged with contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena from the Democrats’ authoritarian January 6 committee, investigating his role in efforts to contest the certification of the 2020 presidential election results. Convicted. Served four months. Peter Navarro, the same offense, the same outcome, four months.
Neither man refused 111 times under oath. Neither was asked about the day of the week. Both faced the same statute for summoned witnesses, 2 U.S.C. §192, that now sits before the Attorney General with Anthony Fauci’s name on it.
2 U.S.C. §192: “Every person…summoned as a witness by…either House of Congress to give testimony…upon any matter under inquiry…who, having appeared, refuses to answer any question pertinent to the question under inquiry, shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor….”
Asked on August 6 whether the DOJ should prosecute, President Trump pointed to the Bannon and Navarro cases and said: “So when you see that happen, you sort of say, maybe he should. What he did is far more serious than a lot of crimes, frankly.”
Let’s stay with those words, because a great deal is riding on them.
The President of the United States said Anthony Fauci’s conduct was far more serious than a lot of crimes. Not questionable. More serious than a lot of crimes — from a man who has spent a decade experiencing lawfare against him and his family up close (Flash image: Melania’s underwear drawer items being groped by federal agents). After the Biden administration, Trump knows exactly what the term ‘serious crimes’ really means.
And the strongest thing President Trump would attach to a prosecution is maybe.
There is no reading in which both halves of that sentence sit comfortably together. If the conduct is worse than a lot of crimes, then prosecuting it is not a maybe. It is the ordinary consequence a country applies to conduct worse than a lot of crimes.
And if it genuinely is a maybe, then the first half was rhetoric — and rhetoric is what We The People have been force-fed during this COVID era, for six years, by the biomedical security complex. Let’s
The President says that Fauci’s conduct was worse than a lot of crimes. Two men went to prison for four months for defying a subpoena once. The Fauci man defied one a hundred and eleven times.
None of that is complicated. It simply needs to be restated.
And we are entitled to notice the gap. And to say, on the record and respectfully:
Mr. President — you named the seriousness. The referral is with your Attorney General. The country is waiting to learn which half of that sentence you meant.
We wrote in Issue #5 that when two warnings reached the top of NIH in the spring of 2021 and neither was published, nobody had to give an order. That is how GACRocratic institutional outcomes are actually produced.
The same mechanism is available now, running the other direction.
No president has to instruct an Attorney General to decline a referral. There are a hundred lawful ways for a criminal referral to become nothing, especially when upper-echelon quid pro quo’s are at play. Things like allegedly insufficient evidence, prosecutorial discretion, resource priorities, a pending review that never concludes. Each is individually defensible. Together they produce a result, and might ultimately answer the “maybe.”
We can’t predict that outcome, but don’t you agree that this should be named and discussed in advance rather than explained away afterward.
So, plainly, for the record, before we know:
If the Justice Department charges Anthony Fauci, the system worked. Slowly, imperfectly, six years later, under the autopen pardon of a demented president that should never have been written — but it worked. We will say so.
If the Justice Department declines, then Bannon and Navaro served four months for an offense Fauci committed more than a hundred times over, and the difference between them was not the conduct. That is not a theory. And nothing would say
We will report either outcome. Let’s remember the Bannon-Navaro standard now so that neither one need to be reinterpreted later.
In Heather Heying’s COVID-era stories series, a mother named Amy Johnson wrote about her son David, who died at twenty-five after losing a year of his life. Her lines, quoted briefly
“My son died at age 25 [from COVID]...because some sociopaths and psychopaths…chose to play dangerous games with deadly pathogens, and then lied about it all. Five years on, I still hope for justice.
Not a hearing. Not a viral clip. The ordinary thing a country is supposed to provide when someone is harmed — a proceeding, with rules, that reach a conclusion.
That is what is on the Attorney General’s desk. Not vengeance. Procedure.
If the referral dies quietly, the question stops being about Anthony Fauci.
It becomes a question about the structure he is sitting inside — what it is, who is in it, and how a man comes to be beyond the reach of a subpoena in a country that abolished nobility - and control by any sort of global power pyramid - in its founding document.
Let’s take that question up next.
⚡ WHAT YOU CAN DO
📢 Make the Call — The referral is with the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. Ask the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, Jeanine Pirro - call (202) 252-7566 - to treat Fauci the same way Bannon and Navarro referrals were treated in response to the J6 events. Same statute, same office, same standard.
🎥 Watch It Yourself — Watch ten minutes of the hearing. Not a clip — ten consecutive minutes. The repetition is the evidence.
🗳️ Remember in November — Not one Democrat senator at the hearing asked Fauci any questions and they’ve said nothing since.
🔗 Break the Blackout — Send this to someone who thinks the story ended when the hearing did. It didn’t. It moved our consciences and reminded of our duty to dissent.
❤️ Tap the Heart — If you’re opposed to Trump’s “Maybe.”
🔄 Restack it. The Bannon-Navaro standard is worth having on the record.
🎧 Audio player is at the top.
💬 Speak Up — What outcome would change your mind about whether the system still works? Say it now, before we know. Comments are open.
First, do no harm. Second, speak up!
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