WASHINGTON — Former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Dr. Anthony Fauci enlisted the help of “media friends” and former President Barack Obama to beat back allegations in 2021 that his agency funded painful experiments on beagle puppies who were later euthanized, according to records recently released by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.).
The diary entries that Fauci made in that year about the so-called “Beaglegate” scandal show he used his allies in the media and politics to respond to attacks over the NIAID-funded study — despite publicly denying his agency approved the dog experiments at the time.
“It is so very clear now that this is a concerted effort to discredit me and assassinate my character,” Fauci wrote in an Oct. 26, 2021, entry. “We have counted the attacks regarding the Beagle dog experiments, but still the attacks continue falsely claiming that NIAID funded the studies.”
The newly released diary entries dug up by the Trump administration from 11 separate government servers, according to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., reveal the extent to which Fauci relied on high-powered allies to protect his image.
White Coat Waste Project, a bipartisan group founded by a GOP strategist, first exposed the Beaglegate scandal that took up significant space in Fauci’s personal notes.
NIAID approved a $375,000 grant from 2019 to 2020 that forced the snouts of sedated pooches into mesh pouches to be eaten by sand flies that had been food-deprived for 24 hours — and the dogs were later euthanized, according to internal grant documents.
That resulted in a letter of condemnation from Republican and Democratic members of Congress — and White Coat Waste later accused Fauci of lying in House testimony that he hadn’t used his personal email to conduct government business.
In early November 2021, Fauci wrote in diary entries that he also received a call from Obama who “expressed concern” and offered to “call up” then-President Biden’s chief of staff Ron Klain or other officials “to have the administration be proactive in countering these lies.”
“Obama said that Donald Trump junior is ‘A f–king moron,’” Fauci wrote in the Nov. 4, 2021, entry. “He apologized for using crude language but then went on to say that Donald Trump was a hopeless idiot who was a pathologic liar.”
Six days later, the Biden White House COVID czar also fielded a call from a senior adviser to Obama about a PR strategy for handling the “Beaglegate” accusations.
In earlier October 2021 entries, Fauci also claimed, “I have no idea what the grant is nor what
they are doing in the grants and I’m asking the staff to investigate,” but three years later he testified to a House subcommittee investigating the origins of the coronavirus pandemic that he approved the funding for the beagle experiment.
“I signed off on them because they were approved by a peer review,” he told members of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic in a June 3, 2024, hearing.
The diaries show that Fauci found an ally in a Washington Post journalist. He referenced writer Yasmeen Abutaleb more than two dozen times in the newly released diary entries, praising the “[f]antastic article” that she eventually published in November 2021 on “the false claims against me by the right wing motivated White Coat Waste project regarding the Beagle experiments.”
“Yasmeen Abutaleb (Washington Post) Has agreed to write a story trying to uncover the source of this organized effort to discredit me period up to this point I have told her to hold back on doing any big story,” he wrote on Oct. 27, 2021.
“I had a long conversation with Yasmeen Abutaleb of the Washington Post yesterday,” he added on Oct. 28, 2021, in another note to himself that the journalist was “getting very worked up about the fact that she realizes now that there is an organized effort to discredit me and she wants to use the investigative reporter capabilities of the Washington Post to try and find out if they can track funding for this effort to the Republican Party or to any other organization that is trying to discredit me. Let us see how this turns out.”
One day later, he also emailed Abutaleb, whom he referred to in other entries as one of his “media friends,” saying: “I will send you an e-mail via my gmail account” amid discussions about the bipartisan blowback to the beagle research, The Post first reported.
David Morens, a former senior adviser to the NIAID head, was indicted earlier this year for concealing and destroying federal records by evading Freedom of Information Act requests and using a private email to communicate with grantees.
David Schertler, an attorney for Fauci, previously said in a statement that the email to Abutaleb “involved a personal matter and not a matter related to government business.”
Reps for Obama and for Abutaleb, who now works for Reuters, did not respond to The Post’s requests for comment.
White Coat Waste said the dairies reveal Fauci’s “covert” PR campaign.
“From the moment we exposed Beaglegate, the Washington establishment—bureaucrats, politicians and the corporate media—circled the wagons to defend Fauci over his funding of deadly dog labs,” said Justin Goodman, senior vice president of White Coat Waste, in a statement.
“Now, Fauci’s own diary reveals that former President Barack Obama personally helped him coordinate a covert damage-control campaign to discredit White Coat Waste after we ignited what The Washington Post called ‘the biggest firestorm yet for Fauci.’”
