Last month, Dr. Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), repeatedly pleaded the Fifth Amendment during the hearing before the Senate’s Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
The Fifth Amendment says, among other things, that an individual cannot be compelled to be a witness against himself (or herself) when accused of a crime. Not even, by the U.S. Congress.
During that July 29 Senate hearing, Dr. Fauci asserted his Fifth Amendment right 111 times, including when he was asked about the color of the tie he was wearing.
I, too, have often been confused about the color of my tie. Is it blue… or purple? You can’t always tell.
And I felt some sympathy for the Doctor, because I myself once pleaded the Fifth.
Just once.
Many important people — more important than me — have pleaded it more than once. But it’s our Constitutional right, here in America.
We have a lot of rights in this country, and some are Constitutional and some aren’t. I have the right, for example, to possess and use a library card. This right is not documented anywhere, as far as I know. Certainly, it’s not in the Constitution. It’s just a ‘natural human right’ that comes with living in a town that happens to have a public library.
And a pretty decent library, if I want to be honest about it.
Which is another natural right I have. The right to be honest.
Do I have the right to be dishonest? Reading the news these days, it would appear that the right to intentionally mislead people is a guaranteed right, although — once again — it’s not specifically mentioned in the Constitution.
Other rights are, however, specifically mentioned in the Constitution. The Fifth Amendment, for example, says I can’t be held to answer for a capital or otherwise infamous crime unless indicted by a grand jury… and I can’t be be tried twice for the same crime… and also :
No person… shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself…
In my particular instance, when I had to plead the Fifth, my wife Darlene (now my ex-wife) asked me where I had been at 4am on a particular Saturday morning.
In a very unpleasant tone of voice.
This interrogation happened a bit later that same Saturday morning. I probably could have made up a halfway-believable story, but I was a bit hung over and not thinking straight, so I said, “I plead the Fifth.”
Darlene: “You… what?”
Me: “I’m pleading the Fifth Amendment. I don’t have to answer a question that might incriminate me. It’s in the Constitution.”
This put Darlene on her back foot for a moment. I don’t think she had ever read the Constitution. But she knew her rights, and she knew how to improvise an argument.
Darlene: “I think I have a right to know where my husband was at 4am this morning, and why there’s a lipstick stain on his collar.” (It was actually a red wine stain.)
I had to point out to Darlene, that the right to know where your husband has been, is an assumed, natural right — but not a Constitutional right. But the Fifth Amendment is actually part of the Constitution.
Did I mention that Darlene is now my ex-wife? I suspect my decision, to plead the Fifth that morning, may have contributed to the eventual outcome.
But to get back to the story at hand. Prominent people pleading the Fifth.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, for example.
You can watch a 55-minute video of Dr. Fauci pleading the Fifth on the CBS website. I’m not recommending that you watch it, mind you. But it’s there to watch.
It seems that a U.S. Senator from Kentucky, Dr. Rand Paul, had released 1,100 unredacted pages from Dr. Fauci’s professional diary written during the COVID-19 crisis, and had called the Senate Committee hearing to grill Dr. Fauci about the information contained in the diary.
Which helps explain why I personally don’t keep a dairy.
Over the past five years or so, Senator Paul has often accused Dr. Fauci of misleading the American people during that crisis. But as I asserted earlier, the right to mislead the public seems to be a guaranteed right, here in America.
Dr. Fauci explained his decision to repeatedly plead the Fifth.
Given Senator Paul’s obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution, his repeated slanderous comments about me, and recently his publicly releasing my unredacted personal diary aimed at embarrassing and intimidating me, the only conclusion I can reach is that the sole reason he is calling me before this Committee is to get me to say something, anything that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, ‘behind bars’…
Considering that both Senator Paul and Dr. Fauci work in — or once worked in — the federal government, we have to grant them the right to lie through their teeth. Not as a Constitutional right, but as a natural human right.
But Dr. Fauci also has an authentic Constitutional Fifth Amendment right, that protects him from being compelled — even by the U.S. Congress — to incriminate himself.
Yes, a lot of people died during the COVID crisis, and I have no doubt a lot of lies were told. But even a former President has the right to plead the Fifth.
Following his first term as President, Donald Trump faced a lawsuit in New York concerning his family business, and in 2022, he pleaded the Fifth more than 440 times during a deposition for the New York attorney general’s investigation. Mr. Trump explained his decision to refuse to answer certain questions during the deposition, according to video released by the attorney general’s office:
I once asked, ‘If you’re innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?’… Now I know the answer to that question. When your family, your company and all the people in your orbit have become the targets of an unfounded, politically motivated witch hunt supported by lawyers, prosecutors and the fake news media, you really have no choice…
That being said… I did, in fact, have a choice, that Saturday morning with Darlene, whether or not to plead the Fifth. And to be perfectly honest, it really was a wine stain, not a lipstick stain.
But I guess I figured, if it’s good enough for Donald Trump, it’s good enough for me.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all. You can read more stories on his Substack account.