Biden said the preemptive pardons were needed because of threats of “unjustified and politically motivated prosecutions” by the incoming administration.
“The issuance of these pardons should not be mistaken as an acknowledgment that any individual engaged in any wrongdoing, nor should acceptance be misconstrued as an admission of guilt for any offense,” Biden said in a statement issued hours before President-elect Donald Trump takes the oath of office.
Biden said “exceptional circumstances” had prompted the pardons. “Even when individuals have done nothing wrong — and in fact have done the right thing — and will ultimately be exonerated, the mere fact of being investigated or prosecuted can irreparably damage reputations and finances,” he said.
In 2021 Trump Discussed Pardoning Himself, NYT
It is not clear that the incoming Trump administration intends to prosecute the individuals. Pam Bondi, Trump’s nominee for attorney general, said last week during her confirmation hearing that there wouldn’t be political prosecutions on her watch. But Trump’s nominee for FBI director, Kash Patel, has called for many of Trump’s opponents to be investigated or prosecuted.
Fauci was a leading figure in the U.S. response to the COVID-19 pandemic. An infectious disease specialist at the National Institutes of Health, he encouraged people to wear masks and social distance, but Trump allies accuse him of covering up the alleged real causes of COVID. Trump called Fauci a “disaster”and Fauci has been investigated by congressional Republicans.
For months, members of the Jan. 6 committee had discussed the potential of Biden issuing preemptive pardons during calls behind closed doors. However, the group was split. For example, Thompson told NPR he welcomed a pardon from Biden. But by and large, he was the committee’s sole member that expressed that interest publicly. Maryland Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin was less clear on the plans earlier this month. “It’s not up to me,” he said.
Staffers for the House select Jan. 6 committee were “surprised” by the news of the pardon. A congressional aide said they were sorting whether they needed to accept the pardon or how the process worked. There was plenty of confusion since the announcement didn’t include names or specifics of what the pardon covered. However, the aide, who was not authorized to speak on the record, said staffers were relieved by the news in case the Trump administration did target the committee’s staff.
In the end, it appears the panel’s final report pardons will cover dozens of staffers. More than 50 were listed in the preliminary section of the panel’s final report. It was also unclear if the pardons covered consultants and contractors also listed in the report.
What was an allegation against Fauci?
Republicans accused Fauci of a wide range of misdeeds linked to the debate over the origin of the pandemic. They charged him with protecting a nonprofit group suspected of mishandling a grant that funded virus research in China, colluding with researchers who published a high-profile paper arguing the pandemic virus was not engineered by scientists, and turning a blind eye to a staffer who used a private email account to hide his communications from the public.
Democrats rushed to defend the record of the longtime adviser to presidents, who retired in 2022. “Under the guise of investigating the pandemic’s origins, House Republicans have abdicated their responsibility to objectively examine how COVID-19 came to be, and instead weaponized concerns about a lab-related origin to fuel sentiment against our nation’s scientists and public health officials for partisan gain,” said Representative Raul Ruiz (CA), the panel’s ranking Democrat.
For his part, Fauci—a veteran of numerous appearances before Congress—held his ground, assailing accusations made against him as “seriously distorted,” “absolutely false,” and “simply preposterous.” He noted that COVID-19 policy decisions made early in the pandemic were not entirely his. In a January interview with staff from the House panel he had said the early government guidance that people stay 2 meters apart “sort of just appeared.” Fauci said he meant that there had been no scientific study of distancing. He also said the policy—which was later dropped—had originated with CDC. Fauci noted that, at the time, scientific understanding of how to combat SARS-CoV-2 was a “moving target.”
The Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released a staff memorandum titled “Allegations of Wrongdoing and Illegal Activity by Dr. David Morens, Senior Advisor to National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases former-Director, Dr. Anthony Fauci.” This memo presents emails as evidence that Fauci was engaged in serious misconduct and potentially illegal actions while serving as a Senior Advisor to Dr. Fauci during the COVID-19 pandemic. The memo includes previously unreleased email correspondence, obtained by subpoena, that incriminates Dr. Morens in undermining the operations of the U.S. government, unlawfully deleting federal COVID-19 records, using a personal email to avoid the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), and repeatedly acting unbecoming of a federal employee. Further, the memo reveals new emails suggesting Dr. Fauci was aware of Dr. Morens’s nefarious behavior and may have even engaged in federal records violations himself.”
Fauci also denied that he tried to protect or help conservation biologist Peter Daszak and his nonprofit group, the EcoHealth Alliance. In April 2020, Trump moved to kill a NIAID grant to the group after claims that the work it funded in Wuhan, China, led to the emergence of SARS-CoV-2. Fauci said he questioned the legality of that decision, which was later deemed improper. But he said he agrees with last month’s move by federal health officials to suspend—and seek a longer ban on—federal funding for EcoHealth because of its alleged violations of National Institutes of Health rules.
Fauci pushed back on suggestions he had any role in writing the now-famous Nature Medicine correspondence, “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2,” that argued against the virus being created in a lab. Although he thinks the evidence supports a natural origin, Fauci testified that “I have always said … I keep an open mind” about the possibility of a lab leak. He also noted he and his family have received—and still do—death threats from those who believe Fauci created the pandemic virus or covered up its origins.
In his written testimony, Fauci distanced himself from an adviser, David Morens, who used personal email to communicate with Daszak and others about EcoHealth’s troubles in a bid to evade public records laws. Fauci said Morens helped him write papers and had no role in policy. Morens’s attempts to avoid public records laws were “an aberrancy and an outlier,” he said, and his efforts to help Daszak, an old friend, were “inappropriate.” Fauci denied conducting official business through personal email, as Morens had claimed in one email to Daszak.
The National Intelligence Council and four other agencies said animals were the likely source. The FBI and the Department of Energy thought it was more likely to be a laboratory incident.
US intelligence agencies have found no direct evidence that Covid-19 broke out from a Chinese laboratory, a declassified report has said.
Prof James Wood, the co-director of Cambridge Infectious Diseases, said the study provided “very strong evidence” of the pandemic starting in wildlife stalls at the market. However, he said it could not be definitive because the samples were collected after the market closed, and the pandemic probably started weeks earlier.
And he warned “little or nothing” was being done to limit the live trade in wildlife, and “uncontrolled transmission of animal infections poses a major risk of future pandemics”.
“The Central Intelligence Agency and another agency remain unable to determine the precise origin of the Covid-19 pandemic, as both (natural and lab) hypotheses rely on significant assumptions or face challenges with conflicting reporting,” said the 10-page report.
n the United States, there have been 103,436,829 confirmed cases of COVID-19 with 1,210,707[3] confirmed deaths, the most of any country, and the 17th highest per capita worldwide.The COVID-19 pandemic ranks as the deadliest disaster in the country’s history.
It was the third-leading cause of death in the U.S. in 2020, behind heart disease and cancer.
From 2019 to 2020, U.S. life expectancy dropped by three years for Hispanic and Latino Americans, 2.9 years for African Americans, and 1.2 years for white Americans.
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