Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. accused Dr. Anthony Fauci of knowingly lying to Americans during the pandemic, citing private communications that he says expose a gulf between what Fauci believed and what he told the country.
Kennedy made the accusation Friday on "The Alex Marlow Show," the same day Fauci declined a request to testify voluntarily before Sen. Ron Johnson's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Fauci's attorney argued that another congressional appearance would "impermissibly harass or degrade Dr. Fauci for political purposes", a claim that rings hollow given the seriousness of the allegations now piling up against the former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director.
Kennedy did not hold back about what the newly disclosed private communications reveal. As Newsmax reported, the HHS secretary described a pattern of deliberate deception rooted in Fauci's personal ambition.
"He knew that he was lying, and there was something about his character that made him feel that that was OK."
That is a sitting cabinet secretary, the man who now runs the department Fauci once served, accusing the most prominent public health official of the pandemic era of conscious dishonesty. Kennedy went further, describing Fauci's motivation as a mix of control and celebrity.
"It was all, 'Make people do what we want them to do,' and then, you know, enjoy the fame."
The private communications Kennedy referenced are part of a growing trove of evidence that Senate investigators have been pulling from Fauci's personal work iPhone. Sen. Johnson's investigation has already turned up more than 34,000 text messages and 522 voicemails from that device, according to Fox News.
The first batch of released texts contained a striking example of the gap Kennedy described. In one message, Fauci privately raised concerns that mRNA vaccine second doses could cause miscarriages in first-trimester pregnancies due to cytokine storms and fever. That private warning stands in sharp contrast to the public messaging at the time, which broadly assured pregnant women the vaccines were safe.
Fauci wrote in the text: "Since many people have significant cytokines storm and fever after the 2nd dose, this theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester." The public never heard that concern from him. As we previously reported, Fauci privately worried about vaccine miscarriage risk while the government told expectant mothers the shots were safe.
Kennedy framed this disconnect in blunt terms on the podcast:
"There was just this massive delta between what he was telling himself every day and then what he was telling the country."
Johnson called the released texts just the "tip of the iceberg" and said the investigation is far from over.
Fauci's refusal to appear voluntarily before Johnson's subcommittee came after an already combative July 29 Senate hearing in which the former NIAID director invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination roughly 100 times. That performance, sitting before elected representatives and refusing, over and over, to answer questions about his conduct during a crisis that affected every American, prompted the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee to vote along party lines to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress.
The contempt vote could lead to a formal referral to the Justice Department. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky has argued that Fauci should not even be permitted to invoke the Fifth Amendment over conduct covered by former President Joe Biden's preemptive pardon. Paul's logic is straightforward: if Biden's pardon already shields Fauci from criminal prosecution for the pardoned conduct, then Fauci faces no risk of self-incrimination on those matters, and the constitutional privilege does not apply.
Paul has been pushing to send the contempt referral directly to the Justice Department, bypassing a full Senate vote to speed the process.
Kennedy acknowledged on the podcast that Biden's preemptive pardon creates a significant barrier to criminal accountability.
"The problem with prosecuting Dr. Fauci is that the Biden administration gave him a full pardon. So it makes it difficult."
But the HHS secretary argued that the value of the disclosures goes beyond whether Fauci ever faces a courtroom. Kennedy cast the issue as a matter of institutional credibility, the kind of credibility that public health agencies need during the next crisis, whenever it comes.
"It's absolutely critical that people believe the government agencies when they say something. And that means that the government agencies have to trust the people and trust that they can tell them the truth."
That argument cuts to the core of why the Fauci investigation matters even with a pardon in place. Millions of Americans made life-altering decisions during the pandemic, about vaccines, about their jobs, about their children's schooling, based on public guidance that Fauci shaped. If his private communications show he harbored doubts he never shared, the public has a right to know. And the institutions he led have an obligation to account for the gap.
The investigation has faced resistance from within the very agency Kennedy now leads. Sen. Johnson alleged that career HHS employees, some of whom he described as people who "were involved in the cover-up", are actively working to block Kennedy's transparency efforts from inside the department.
Johnson put it plainly: "Bobby Kennedy has people in those agencies sabotaging his efforts at radical transparency. So this is like pulling teeth." The accusation suggests that the obstacles to accountability extend beyond Fauci himself to a layer of entrenched bureaucrats who have institutional reasons to keep pandemic-era decisions from public scrutiny. Other lawmakers have joined the push; Sen. Marshall has demanded a special counsel to investigate Fauci over the private vaccine texts.
Fauci's attorneys, meanwhile, have maintained that new testimony could create fresh legal exposure beyond what the Biden pardon covers. That argument raises its own questions. If Fauci told the truth during the pandemic, new testimony should pose no legal risk. The fact that his own legal team treats a congressional appearance as dangerous territory tells its own story.
Kennedy wrote a book sharply critical of Fauci before joining the Trump administration, so his views on the former NIAID director are well established. But the HHS secretary is no longer just an outside critic. He now controls the department, has access to internal records, and is in a position to ensure that whatever Fauci's government phone contains eventually reaches the public.
Kennedy's broader work at HHS has already surfaced other accountability findings. His department recently revealed that more than one million Obamacare enrollees lack Social Security numbers, raising questions about oversight across multiple federal health programs.
The pattern forming around Fauci is difficult to dismiss. Private texts showing concerns he never voiced publicly. Roughly 100 Fifth Amendment invocations before the Senate. A refusal to appear voluntarily. A contempt vote. A preemptive pardon from a sympathetic president. And career bureaucrats allegedly working to keep the rest of the record buried.
A pardon can keep a man out of prison. It cannot answer the questions that 34,000 text messages are only beginning to ask.
