By Andrew Mark Miller
Fox News host Tucker Carlson opened his show Wednesday addressing recently exposed emails from Dr. Anthony Fauci, concluding the immunologist should be under criminal investigation.
“Are Peter Daszak and Tony Fauci under criminal investigation?” Carlson asked in his opening monologue. “We can only hope they are. They certainly deserve it. At this point, we can’t say for sure. We do know that Fauci hasn’t simply lied about the origins of COVID, pretending to know things he could not know. He has also lied about vaccines in key ways.”
This comes in response to recently uncovered emails from Fauci — some of them between him and Peter Daszak, a key member of the World Health Organization-China joint study team — that show the medical adviser working behind the scenes to downplay the possibility that the coronavirus was developed in a lab. In one email, Fauci told a woman in February of 2020 not to worry about wearing a mask because they aren’t “really effective” in stopping the spread of the disease.
Portions of the emails between Fauci and Daszak were redacted, which prompted Carlson’s question about the two possibly being investigated. He said redactions under the Freedom of Information Act Section B -7(a) only apply to “records or information compiled for law enforcement purposes but only to the extent that production of those documents could reasonably be expected to interfere with enforcement proceedings.”
Carlson referred to the Fauci email trove as the “mother lode,” arguing they prove the doctor lied and misled people under oath multiple times. In one example, Carlson cited Fauci’s emails discussing “gain of function research” in China that he said don’t align with Fauci’s public denial during a related Senate hearing.
“Collectively, they show that from the beginning, Tony Fauci was worried that the public might conclude COVID had originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” Carlson said. “Now, why would Tony Fauci be concerned that Americans would conclude that? Possibly because Tony Fauci knew perfectly well that he had funded gain-of-function experiments at that very same laboratory.”
Carlson was referring to a recent admission by Fauci that his department, the National Institutes of Health, sent $600,000 of taxpayer dollars to Wuhan Institute of Virology to study whether bat coronaviruses could be transmitted to humans.
“We’re Americans, so we assumed the man in charge of protecting the U.S. from COVID must be rational and impressive,” Carlson said. “We also assumed he must be honest, but we were wrong. It soon became clear that Tony Fauci was just another sleazy Federal bureaucrat, deeply political, and often dishonest.”
Fauci has downplayed the significance of the emails and suggested they could be taken out of context. The White House declined to respond to the emails and the controversy surrounding them.
“Let me just say on Dr. Fauci and his emails, he’s also spoken to this many, many times over the course of the last few days, and we’ll let him speak for himself, and he’s been an undeniable asset in our country’s pandemic response,” said White House press secretary Jen Psaki. “But it’s obviously not that advantageous for me to re-litigate the substance of emails from 17 months ago.”