OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Republicans have been threatening to launch investigations into Dr. Anthony Fauci if they win back control of Congress in November’s midterm elections.
Now, Fauci is suggesting he might be leaving in the near future on his own.
During an interview on CNN, Fauci said “no” when asked by Jim Acosta if he would stay in his post as the chief medical adviser at the White House if former President Donald Trump wins the 2024 presidential election.
“If you look at the history of what the response was during the administration, I think, you know, at best, you can say it wasn’t optimal. And I think just, history will speak for itself about that,” Fauci told CNN.
Trump clashed with Fauci numerous times during the first year of the pandemic about hydroxychloroquine, testing, reopening businesses, curtailing travel from China, and several other issues.
WATCH:
NEW: Dr. Fauci says if Trump is reelected, he would not continue to serve as White House Chief Medical Advisor pic.twitter.com/0HRu4ivDnV
— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) May 15, 2022
Earlier this month, Ohio GOP Rep. Jim Jordan said Republicans will “uncover” what Fauci knew about the origins of the coronavirus pandemic.
Jordan argued recently released emails prove there’s a “need to investigate Fauci.”
“If the American people put us back in charge, we are definitely going to do this,” Jordan said, adding that his colleagues would push for a congressional investigation into the origins of the coronavirus.
“Because we now know without a doubt that Dr. Fauci knew on Jan. 31 and Feb. 1 that this thing came from a lab,” Jordan argued. “The top scientists in the country were saying it came from a lab. One scientist says we got the notes now from the conference call on February 1st. One scientist says, ‘I don’t see how this can happen in nature, but it would be easy to do in a lab.’”
“And yet just in a matter of days, they changed their position, write the article that appears in Nature of Medicine Magazine, which then gets cited in the now-famous letter The Lancet, which became the gospel for the fact that Fauci can go out and tell people it didn’t come from a lab when in fact they knew it did,” Jordan continued.
“The interesting thing is. We point this out. We just learned this last week, that the two doctors who were most adamant that this thing came from a lab early on: one is Dr. Kristian Anderson. On Jan. 31, 2020, he says this to Dr. Fauci in an email: ‘Virus looks engineered. The virus not consistent with evolutionary theory.’ So, he knew it came from a lab,” he added.
“They changed their position,” Jordan argued. “And a few months later, guess what? They get an $8.9 million, both him and Dr. [Robert] Garry – the guy who said it couldn’t happen naturally.”
Ohio Republican Senate contender J.D. Vance also recently called for term limits on bureaucrats like Fauci.
At a town hall, Vance said public servants should be term-limited and attacked Fauci.
“We need term limits not just for the legislators but for bureaucrats because ladies and gentlemen, all this talk about experts losing their expert status but there is an expert that not a single person in this room voted for that has far more power than anyone we ever did [vote for]… his name is Anthony Fauci,” Vance said.
“Why does he make more money than anyone else in the federal government? We need term limits for the bureaucrats too,” he added.
“‘When you have the bureaucracy at the EPA, or the IRS or whatever alphabet agency we’re talking about, that is actively against the president of the United States, that’s a fundamental problem for the nature of the Republican itself,” he continued.
Vance added: “The president can’t hire and fire his own people. And he has bureaucrats that are actively against his agenda, but he can’t fire them.”