January 21, 2025 - 6:00pm
In the waning hours of Joe Biden’s administration, the outgoing president signed a flurry of pardons and commutations, which included his own relatives, Gen. Mark Milley, and Jan 6 committee members. He also pardoned Anthony Fauci, former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases during the Covid-19 pandemic.
That last one doesn’t fit with the rest. The pardon of Biden’s family comes after the former president has been credibly accused of shady business dealings involving both his son and brother. Meanwhile, the January 6 Committee and Milley are some of the most virulently anti-Trump voices in the public sphere. If the purpose is to shield Trump’s enemies from revenge by the new president, these pardons are foolhardy but make sense. The commutation of indigenous activist Leonard Peltier’s sentence for killing two FBI agents is a clear nod to the Democrats’ Left wing, which has felt increasingly alienated during the Biden years (Peltier is a cause célèbre among the progressive class).
While Fauci has had plenty of disagreements with the new president, he is nowhere on the supposed “enemy list” of people who betrayed Trump or sought to punish him via lawfare over the last four years. Fauci and Trump had a decent working relationship while the latter was president, and their most significant falling-out in the subsequent years was over Fauci claiming credit for Operation Warp Speed, the quick rollout of the Covid vaccine. Trump considers the accomplishment his own.
There’s also no obvious crime for which Fauci might merit a pardon. It’s true he is hated by the Republican base for his behaviour through the pandemic. His politicisation of the virus, including arguing that Biden’s spending plan had to be passed before schools could re-open, his flip-flopping on precautions including masking, and his attempt to shut down debate while claiming to “represent science” all made him wildly unpopular. But none of this is criminal.
“The issuance of these pardons should not be mistaken as an acknowledgment that any individual engaged in any wrongdoing,” Biden said in a statement. “Nor should acceptance be misconstrued as an admission of guilt for any offence”.
It’s hard not to reach this conclusion, especially when the terms of Biden’s blanket pardon of Fauci begin far before the pandemic, in 2014. Was he doing Gain of Function research against the orders of then-president Barack Obama? Did he know all along that the Wuhan lab leak was not just a viable theory but the likely culprit of the pandemic as he tried to shut down all discussion about the possibility? Even if it can no longer lead to culpability, the people deserve to know the crime Fauci committed to merit this pardon. The Trump administration should ask the questions an incurious media has failed to.
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