Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) says he wants a full public reckoning over the government’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, and he’s making clear that former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci is at the center of that effort.
“I think it’s crucial that we have a COVID reckoning,” Johnson said during the Fight Club Roundtable hosted by Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow and Washington Bureau Chief Matthew Boyle. “These people need to be held accountable.”
Johnson said criminal prosecutions of pandemic-era officials would be difficult to pursue, so public exposure may end up being the strongest form of accountability available. He said officials avoided leaving a paper trail.
They didn’t leave much of a trail. They learned how to destroy emails. They didn’t memorialize things in emails. They’re not that stupid. So it’s going to be difficult.
Johnson said his staff is working through roughly one million pages of documents and continues to find new material as additional devices come to light. He said his team is deliberately organizing the records rather than releasing everything at once.
“We keep finding more things, trying to reveal that and expose it in an organized fashion so it actually makes sense to people rather than just dumping it on the public,” Johnson said.
He added that some documents need to stay under wraps while investigators interview witnesses, so those being questioned don’t know in advance what evidence has already been gathered. Releasing everything immediately, he said, “is not a way to conduct a serious investigation.”
Fauci in the crosshairs
Johnson reserved his sharpest language for Fauci specifically.
I want to make sure that Anthony Fauci’s reputation is completely destroyed, that people actually understand what a truly monstrous individual he was.
Johnson accused Fauci of helping fund gain-of-function research that may have contributed to the pandemic, then covering up the virus’s origins. He also took aim at Fauci’s promotion of COVID-19 vaccines, which he described as a “deadly injection.”
What he did — funding gain-of-function research — probably contributed to the pandemic. Then he covered it all up and pushed a deadly injection on the global population. Nobody knows how destructive that injection will be in the long term. This is a bad guy. I think his appearance before the Homeland Security Committee was a very bad day for him.
Johnson argued that Fauci is already facing a form of accountability through the erosion of his public standing, even as he said Democrats and much of the media continue to defend him.
He is being held accountable through the destruction of his ‘Saint Fauci’ reputation, even though Democrats and the media still want to put him on that pedestal. But I think more Americans’ eyes are open to what a monster he truly was.
