📌 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.
In Issue #7 we wrote the ‘Bannon-Navarro Standard’ down before we knew the answer. Here’s what we know.
The Justice Department confirmed it received Sen. Rand Paul’s criminal referral and said it is reviewing it. On August 12, Attorney General Todd Blanche was asked whether a decision was near.
“Well, no, I don’t have an update. As you guys know, when the Department of Justice receives a referral from Congress, there’s a process. There’s a process of how we take it in and how we investigate it. But any update that I would expect to come from this department would be if there’s ultimately a decision made, and that certainly won’t be anytime soon.”
Note what AG Blanche’s sentence does and does not commit to. It confirms a process. It confirms a review. It commits to no timeline, no criteria, and no obligation to reach any particular end. It is the administrative equivalent of we’ll circle back.
There are, of course, entirely lawful ways for referrals like this to become genuine nothing burgers. Allegedly “insufficient evidence.” Prosecutorial discretion. Resource priorities. A review that never concludes. Each one individually defensible, and not one of them requires anybody from the imagined Biomedical Deep State Mafia to say, “That’s a nice arm you got there. Be a shame if became a veritable pin cusion - for our new modRNA influenza jabs!”
Here is the part almost every account has blurred.
The referral concerns contempt of Congress — specifically, whether Fauci’s repeated Fifth Amendment invocations on July 29 were unlawful.
That is the entire question in front of the Justice Department.
Not gain-of-function funding. Not the corrupt grant oversight.
Not who knew what was being built in Wuhan, or when.
Not the suppression of early treatments.
Not the physicians who lost their licenses for prescribing it.
Not the pregnancy recommendation that went forward after the co-inventor of the platform - Drew Weissman - wrote that he still had concerns about miscarriages and accumulation of the modRNA in the ovaries.
Not the hospital protocols for Remdesivir (AKA per the ICU nurses, “run death is near”).
Not the mothers and fathers who died alone in rooms their children were forbidden to enter.
Not the funerals that were not permitted afterward.
Not the schools that stayed shut, or the year of childhood that isn’t coming back, or the testing scores that have still not recovered.
Not the businesses declared inessential that never reopened, or the families who had built them over thirty years.
Not the churches, synagogues, and mosques padlocked while the liquor stores stayed open.
Not the injured — the ones with myocarditis and many other modRNA “vaccine”-induced pathologies - the ones who cannot work a full day anymore, the ones still being told it is anxiety.
None of that is before the Department of Justice. But it certainly is still before We The People.
Whether one little doctor they called “America’s Doctor” is permitted to say his 21 words 111 times, in one room, on one morning.
Contempt is the narrowest possible charge available.
And it is the one nobody wants to file.
Before we get to Why, we owe readers the strongest argument against our own position.
Paul bypassed a full Senate floor vote and hand-delivered the resolution directly to the Attorney General and to Jeanine Pirro, U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. His reasoning: “It doesn’t have to go to the House, it doesn’t have to be signed by the president and really doesn’t have to go before the Senate.”
Unfortunately, some legal analysts are disagreeing with Senator Paul’s reasoning. The procedures for congressional contempt are set by statute, and a number of them question whether a committee-only referral carries legal force absent full Senate approval.
That matters because if the DOJ declines on procedural grounds, the Senate could possibly cure it with a floor vote. But that risks the matter being sucked into the congressional vortex of delays, like we’re seeing with the SAVE America act, and the conservatives in Congress who want to solve our massive illegal voting problem.
Regardless, silence is the tell, not the outcome. If the DOJ declines Fauci’s contempt referral but says why, then that becomes a transparent legal dispute we can all read. But if the DOJ declines and says nothing or never declines at all, and simply lets the review run until everyone stops asking, well then that is something else that gets sucked down the proverbial memory hole that so readily afflicts Americans.
Bill Gates — funded modRNA “vaccine” development and distribution at enormous scale — documented on Gates Foundation website.
Ralph Baric — UNC: published chimeric bat coronavirus work
Peter Daszak — EcoHealth Alliance: subgrant recipient and Wuhan collaborator; debarred from federal funding in 2025
NIAID — the funding agency Saint Fauci directed for 38 years
Discovery matters. It’s how we could find out which claims survive.
John Leake, the author and investigative writer who works alongside Dr. Peter McCullough, has offered the sharpest explanation on the table.
Leake believes Blanche will not prosecute — and that the reason has nothing to do with the strength of the contempt case.
His argument is about discovery.
A contempt prosecution is not a hearing. It is a federal criminal proceeding, and federal criminal proceedings open doors that Senate committees cannot. Subpoena power that does not stop at an agency’s discretion. Depositions under penalty of perjury with no Fifth Amendment shelter for the Fauci underlings who don’t have presidential pardons. Requiring document production compelled by a judge rather than negotiated with Fauci’s counsel - David Schertler and five others.
Leake’s contention is that the discovery attached to a Fauci trial would reach the whole rotten edifice — every official and institution that knew what was being funded and did not intervene.
If he is right, the calculus is grimly simple. The charge is narrow. The proceeding is not. And you cannot open one without opening the other.
That would make the contempt charge not the smallest risk on the table for the Biomedical Deep State, but the largest. In my opinion, if Fauci is not tried, convicted and placed behind bars, that absence will be ‘negative evidence’ that
Do images of “rodents,” “cheese,” and “rat traps” keep coming to mind? You’re not alone.
August 10, 2026: Sens. Paul and Johnson release Fauci’s text messages from his government-issued phone.
January 2021 exchange: Fauci wrote that the 2nd dose of the COVID-19 “vaccine” could “theoretically” be associated with miscarriages. January 2021.
In Issue #5 of this series: Drew Weissman sent Fauci human-dose intramuscular data in pregnant mice on March 1, 2021, writing, “I have concerns.” The federal recommendation for injection of the modRNA jabs for America’s pregnant women went forward anyway.
Fauci’s text on his phone pre-dates that Weissman email by two months. It is not something Weissman sent him. It is what Fauci wrote himself.
We do not have to speculate about what such a proceeding might surface. Some of it is already public and has simply never been examined under oath.
We reported one example in Duty Calls #37, before this series began: a peer-reviewed paper in Frontiers in Virology, February 21, 2022, reporting that the 19-nucleotide stretch of the SARS-CoV-2 genome containing the furin cleavage site is a 100% match to the sequence Moderna patented in 2016.
In plain English - for any mass-formed D2D readers from blue states - that means the mad scientists played Frankenstein first, four years before the virus escaped or was released from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology. The nucleotide stretch is not similar. It is
Four and a half years on, no laboratory has been asked to replicate the furin cleavage site findings. It sits exactly where it sat in 2022, which is nowhere. Let us not forget this.
So that is one thread. But discovery does not pull just one thread.
On August 12, three Republican attorneys general — James Uthmeier (FL), John McCuskey (WV), and Liz Murrill (LA) — issued a joint investigative subpoena to Fauci. Louisiana is also separately examining perjury and obstruction arising from Fauci’s 2022 deposition, in which he answered 174 times that he “did not recall.”
Encouraging. But Leake’s caution deserves airing: state action may function as circus rather than accountability — visible motion that lets a federal department keep saying not anytime soon.
State AGs cannot prosecute federal crimes. But a preemptive auto-penned presidential pardon does not bind them. That’s great news. But jurisdiction and statutes of limitation do, which is the rest of it.
Yet still, we might consider dragging Dr. Anthony Cockroach Fauci before courts in multiple jurisdictions as a sort of Nemesis by a thousand cuts. Regardless, federal court probably remains the best venue. Unfortunately, it is also the venue with a door that the Washington D&C swamp creatures don’t want opened.
We are not moving the goalposts, so we will restate them exactly as written previously in this series.
Charge Fauci, and the system worked. Decline and explain, and we will report the explanation. Decline and say nothing — or never decide at all — and our two men, Bannon and Navarro, served four months apiece for an offense a third insectile man, posing as a caring doctor, committed a hundred and eleven times over.
That is not a theory. That is subtraction.
And nothing would say the machinery does not reach everyone and there are Americans who truly are Above the Law quite like a review of contempt charges that run on and on and on until Americans lose interest and forget entirely, which is a plausible scenario.
Let’s not get distracted and lose interest. How ’bout them Buckeyes?
❤️ Think Saint Fauci deserves prosecution by our justice system ASAP? Tap the heart.
🔄 Does AG Todd Blanche’s “certainly not anytime soon“ gives you a shiver? Reviews that run quietly depend on nobody watching. Restack this post.
🎧 Hearing is a Memory Hole preventive. Audio player is at the top.
📢 Make the Call and Email (I did) — The referral is now at the Department of Justice. Contact the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, Dr. Jeanine Pirro, and urge her to treat Fauci the same way Bannon and Navarro were treated, but to be a lot harsher.
📢 Ask Your Own AG — Three states issued a subpoena last week. Ask yours why it isn’t four.
🎥 Watch it Yourself — Fauci’s 2022 deposition - with the camera pointed at his face for 7 insufferable hours: 174 non-recollections. Then the 2026 hearing: 111 invocations. Same man, same subject, four years apart.
🔗 Break the Blackout — Send this post to someone who thinks “under review” necessarily means something is happening.
💬 Speak Up — If DOJ declines to prosecute Fauci, according to the contempt referral from Senator Paul, what reason might you accept?
First, do no harm. Second, speak up!
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