Dr. Anthony Fauci's private diary entries, released by Sen. Rand Paul, show the former COVID advisor feeding interview questions to CNN's Jake Tapper and building personal friendships with the anchors who covered him most.
Fauci gave Tapper specific questions to use during a CNN "State of the Union" interview with pediatrician Brett Giroir in July 2020, Fox News Digital reported, citing the diary entries that Sen. Paul, the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, made public on Saturday. The same diary describes private dinners at each other's homes, late-night phone calls, and a stream of flattering text messages between Fauci and some of the most prominent names in broadcast news, raising pointed questions about where the line between source and subject actually fell during the pandemic.
Tapper's name appears 41 times across the diary entries. That count alone tells a story. Fauci did not merely sit for occasional interviews with the CNN anchor, he dined with Tapper and his wife Jennifer at their Washington, D.C., home in July 2020, then hosted the couple at his own home on October 23 of that year.
The most striking disclosure involves the Giroir interview. Fauci wrote that he "gave Jake some questions to ask" Giroir during the CNN Sunday show segment. Later that same month, Tapper called Fauci, waking him at 11:23 a.m., furious that President Trump had tweeted about the exchange. Fauci recorded the call in his diary, misspellings and all:
"Tapper woke me up at 11:23 AM (I went to bed early) furius [sic] at POTUS for tweeting about the fact that Jake severly [sic] questioned Brett Giroir on SOTU CNN show today. Jake was really pissed at the craziness of it all."
A government health official coaching a journalist's questions for a live interview is not a source providing background. It is not even a leak. It is one official shaping the interrogation of another official on national television, while the public watched, unaware that the questions had been pre-loaded.
And the relationship extended well past professional utility. After their July dinner, Fauci wrote warmly about the Tappers:
"Had dinner over Jake Tapper and Jen Tapper's home in DC. Terrific couple. Friendship building."
By October, the friendship had deepened enough for Fauci to record Tapper's private political views. After their dinner on October 23, 2020, Fauci noted: "Jake clearly believes that Trump is totally nuts."
Tapper and Dana Bash went on to co-moderate a 2024 CNN presidential debate between then-President Biden and President Trump. CNN declined to comment when contacted by Fox News Digital.
The diary entries extend beyond CNN's lead anchor. After a contentious April 2021 House subcommittee hearing on COVID-19, during which Fauci clashed with Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, CNN's Bash sent Fauci a text that he preserved in his diary:
"I just watched the whole Jordan thing. Again, you're a better man than I.... As our friend Wolf Blitzer said to me yesterday, no one would have blamed you if you said simply 'Mr. Jordan, go f*** yourself.'"
Two things stand out. First, Bash's use of "our friend Wolf Blitzer", not "my colleague," not "Wolf." The word "our" places Fauci inside the circle, as though he and the CNN anchors share a social world. Second, Blitzer's advice, relayed approvingly, was that Fauci should have told a sitting congressman conducting oversight to go f*** himself. These are the journalists who presented themselves as neutral arbiters of pandemic science.
CNN was not the only network maintaining private lines to the nation's top COVID advisor. Fauci's diary documents similar relationships across the broadcast landscape.
On July 4, 2020, NBC's Andrea Mitchell called Fauci's personal cell phone to apologize for not booking him on her show. The reason: NBC had already committed the slot to governors offering exclusives. Fauci wrote that he told Mitchell he was worried about being "kept off the air", a concern that startled her:
"She was shocked and thought that when I did not come on after requests that it was because I did not want to go on a show."
The entry reveals a government official who viewed regular television appearances not as a duty but as a necessity, and who tracked his own airtime closely enough to raise the alarm when it dipped. Mitchell, for her part, responded not as a journalist evaluating a source but as someone managing a valued relationship.
Then-NBC host Chuck Todd occupied a different role. Fauci wrote that Todd texted him to ask what he thought of an interview, and Fauci used the opening to solicit strategic advice:
"I asked him whether he thought that I should pull back from publicly defending myself against the slanderous attacks since that might call more attention to them."
A federal health official asking a network anchor for media strategy counsel is not a source-reporter dynamic. It is a consultant relationship, except the consultant was simultaneously covering the client on air.
ABC's George Stephanopoulos texted Fauci after a July 2020 appearance on "Good Morning America" in which Fauci dismissed a critical tweet from President Trump. Stephanopoulos's message was brief and admiring: "Thank you, Tony. So impressive." The first-name basis and the tone, gratitude, not inquiry, speak for themselves.
At CBS, the arrangement was even more direct. Fauci wrote that CBS News chief medical correspondent Dr. Jonathan LaPook emailed him over a weekend so Fauci could prep LaPook for an upcoming television interview on universal flu vaccine and HIV vaccines. LaPook then went on CBS Morning News and, per Fauci's diary, "mentioned me several times."
NBC News, ABC News, and CBS News did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital's requests for comment.
Taken individually, any single entry might look like routine Washington networking. A source builds trust with reporters. Reporters cultivate access. That is how the business works. But the diary, read as a whole, describes something different in both scale and character.
Fauci was not just answering questions from journalists. He was feeding them questions to ask his bureaucratic rivals. He was dining privately with the anchors who interviewed him on air. He was receiving texts of encouragement and political solidarity after congressional hearings. He was asking TV hosts for advice on his personal public-relations strategy. And he was prepping a network medical correspondent for an interview, then noting approvingly when that correspondent cited him on camera.
Across CNN, NBC, ABC, and CBS, the pattern is consistent: Fauci operated less as a government official accountable to the public and more as a media figure managing his own brand, with the willing cooperation of the journalists who were supposed to hold him accountable.
Sen. Paul, who has clashed publicly with Fauci over COVID-19 policy and the origins of the pandemic, released the diary entries through his role as chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee. The source article does not describe how Paul obtained the diary or whether the entries released represent the full document.
Those are fair questions. But the diary's own words, in Fauci's own hand, are not in dispute. He wrote them. He recorded the dinners, the phone calls, the texts, and the question-feeding. He did so, apparently, without any sense that the relationships he was describing might compromise the independence of the people covering him.
Americans spent 2020 and 2021 being told to trust the science and trust the journalists explaining it. Fauci's diary suggests those journalists were not so much explaining the science as amplifying the scientist, on his terms, with his questions, over dinner at his house.
