Fauci to Ted Cruz: 'I Should Be Prosecuted? What Happened on January 6, Senator?'

Pam KeyNovember 28, 2021

National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Dr. Anthony Fauci said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that it was laughable that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) thinks he should be prosecuted for coronavirus pandemic failures after what happened on January 6 Capitol riot.

During a Senate hearing in October, Cruz told Attorney General Merrick Garland that Fauci should be investigated over accusations he lied to Congress.

Partial transcript as follows:

FAUCI: I dealt with it by focusing on what my job is from the time that I went into medicine to right now, where I am at my age, my job has been totally focused on doing what I can with the talents and the influence I had to make scientific advances to protect the health of the American public. So anybody who spins lies and threatens and all that theater that goes on with some of the investigations and the congressional committees and the Rand Paul’s and all that other nonsense, that’s noise, that’s noise. I know what my job is.

BRENNAN: Senator Cruz told the attorney general you should be prosecuted.

FAUCI: Yeah. I have to laugh at that. I should be prosecuted? What happened on Jan. 6, senator?

BRENNAN: Do you think that this is about making you a scapegoat to deflect–

DR. FAUCI: Of course-

BRENNAN: –From President Trump?

FAUCI: Of course, you have to be asleep not to figure that one out.

BRENNAN: Well, there are a lot of Republican senators taking aim at this. I mean–

FAUCI: That’s OK, I’m just going to do my job and I’m going to be saving lives and they’re going to be lying.

BRENNAN: It just, it seems, another layer of danger to play politics around matters of life and death.

FAUCI: Right, exactly. Exactly. And to me, that’s- that’s unbelievably bad because all I want to do is save people’s lives. Anybody who’s looking at this carefully realizes that there’s a distinct anti-science flavor to this. So if they get up and criticize science, nobody’s going to know what they’re talking about. But if they get up and really aim their bullets at Tony Fauci, well, people could recognize there’s a person there. There’s a face, there’s a voice you can recognize, you see him on television. So it’s easy to criticize, but they’re really criticizing science because I represent science. That’s dangerous. To me, that’s more dangerous than the slings and the arrows that get thrown at me. And if you damage science, you are doing something very detrimental to society long after I leave.