Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS) won’t let go of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s hot mic moment, in which the President’s chief medical advisor grumbled that the senator was a “moron” after he demanded that Fauci’s already public financial disclosures … be made public.
On Friday, Marshall announced that he plans to introduce a bill named the “FAUCI Act” — which is supposedly shorthand for the “Financial Accountability for Uniquely Compensated Individuals Act” — in his latest boost to amplify Republicans’ attacks against the White House chief medical adviser.
Marshall’s stunt to get back at Fauci comes days after the nation’s top infectious diseases expert pushed back at the GOP senator’s conspiratorial insistence during a Senate Health Committee hearing that he had not made his financial disclosure form available to the public. He had.
Fauci noted that his financial disclosures have, in fact, been available to the public for years due to his work at NIAID.
“What are you talking about?” Fauci asked the senator. “My financial disclosures are public knowledge and have been so.”
“You are getting amazingly wrong information,” he marveled at the time.
After Marshall’s time ended, the White House chief medical adviser was caught on a hot mic continuing to vent: “What a moron,” he said. “Jesus Christ.”
Marshall, apparently, still cannot find them. The FAUCI Act would require the Office of Government Ethics (OGE) to provide public access of financial disclosures for administration officials such as Fauci as well as a list of government officials whose financials records are not public.
Marshall’s latest dig at Fauci adds to the ongoing attacks against the nation’s top infectious diseases expert by right-wingers in an effort to oppose public health measures and cover for the Trump administration’s disastrous COVID-19 response.
During the same Senate hearing when Fauci clashed with Marshall last week, Fauci once again found himself sparring with Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) when he called the GOP senator out over his efforts to fundraise off of his ongoing attacks against him.
“You go to Rand Paul’s website, and you see ‘fire Dr. Fauci’ with a little box that says ‘contribute here!’” Fauci said during the hearing, holding up examples of Paul’s campaign materials. “You can do $5, $10, $20, $100.”
“So you are making a catastrophic epidemic for your political gain,” he told the senator. “So I ask myself why would the senator want to do this?”
Fauci then noted that Paul’s attacks against him have spurred an escalation in the death threats he has received from the “crazies out there,” which include the arrest last month of an armed man in Iowa who claimed he was traveling from Sacramento to Washington, D.C. to kill Fauci.
