FOX News chief political analyst Brit Hume argues Anthony Fauci’s diaries contradict his public statements on COVID lockdowns and the lab leak theory.

BRET BAIER, ANCHOR: President Trump, during the COVID days, talking about Anthony Fauci. Let’s talk about Fauci, COVID tonight, those diaries and all the entries. FOX News Chief Political Analyst Brit Hume is here. Brit, I’ll read this one, May 21st, 2020, the situation, this is Anthony Fauci, with my national and international fame is explosive, really unimaginable. “It’s not hyperbole to say that today I’m the most famous and talked about person in the country and one of the most recognizable person in the world. POTUS seems to be enamored of me, even though I’m taking the spotlight away from him. We’re developing a very unique and interesting relationship.” That’s obviously not the most forward-leaning of the post, maybe Mark Meredith covered it earlier about the lab leak and whether it was real or not. There’s a lot in here. BRIT HUME, FOX NEWS CHIEF POLITICAL ANALYST: There is, Bret, and it reveals two things, really. One of them is that Fauci didn’t really believe the stuff that he was saying in terms of the origin of the disease, and he also didn’t, he’s also denied repeatedly, and we’ve seen it in television interviews and so on, that he was urging any shutdowns. These documents prove otherwise. He brags about getting New York City to shut down its schools and so on, about getting California to do the same thing. So he was very much an architect of what you may remember me calling back at the time, Brit, I called it the worst public policy decision of my lifetime, and I think it was, and I think it’s made in some ways even worse now, knowing what we know about what Fauci was really thinking and about how much time he spent in his diaries talking about how famous he’d become and all the glorification he was getting in the news media and how palsy a lot of news media people had gotten with him. BAIER: It’s going to be a fiery hearing, obviously, on Wednesday. You mentioned the lab leak theory. I asked a lot during that time. We were one of the first outlets to cover the possibility. Senator Tom Cotton wrote an op-ed based on sourcing. Here’s Fauci in the diary excerpt on the lab leak possibility, January 2020. “They bring up the possibility that this could have been deliberately inserted or either accidentally released or deliberately released by a crazy person in the lab, the former being the most likely.” But at the same time, and post after that, even other posts inside the diary, he was saying this. Here’s from “Special Report.” DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Upon re-looking at this carefully now, we think it’s more likely that it was a natural evolution. BAIER: And you still believe that? FAUCI: Could it have been a lab leak? BAIER: There are more and more organizations that point to a lab leak. FAUCI: No, no, that’s not so, Bret. BAIER: No, I mean, there are more people saying it, both here and around the world. FAUCI: Yeah, but, Bret, more people saying it doesn’t mean there’s more evidence of it. BAIER: And, Brit, we went round and round many times at The Wall Street Journal on February 2023, “Lab Leak Most Likely Origin of COVID-19 Pandemic.” Many articles like that in the years since. HUME: Yeah, and the FBI at the time had basically concluded that the lab leak was responsible for it. So this stuff that Fauci was saying was flying in the face of what other, with some authority on the matter, were saying as well. And I think, you know, think of the damage that was done by the shutdowns to the US economy, to kids’ education. I mean, I think it’s fair to argue that a lot of kids have not recovered and may never recover from being out of school for the length of time that Fauci wanted them to be because he was urging these shutdowns. So I think, you know, this raises an intriguing question. If we now think, and if the committee concludes that he knew better than some of the stuff he was saying, he probably will be glad that he was given a pardon. But that does mean that he can’t take the Fifth if criminality is alleged against him, and there are people who think that it should be. The pardon may spare him criminal indictment if it were to come to that, but it won’t spare him from having to testify because it can’t criminalize him if he’s pardoned. BAIER: And to that point, you know, this whole diary and all of these emails for the coverage, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNOW have not covered it. And there’s a lot of people out there questioning whether this hearing, because he’s been pardoned, is going to lead to anything off of it. HUME: Yeah, that’s a good question, Bret. It might not. But on the other hand, he can’t refuse to answer on a self-incrimination grounds, I don’t think. I might also add to what you just said, Bret, that I searched carefully the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times and the Washington Post today for their, you know, I searched them for Fauci to see if any story on these revelations have come out so far, not a word in any of those papers that I could find.

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