Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill announced on August 1 that her state is launching a formal investigation into Dr. Anthony Fauci. The announcement came exactly three days after Fauci's Senate testimony, where the former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times.
Louisiana is now the third state to open an investigation. Alabama and Florida got there first.
Murrill didn't bother with diplomatic language. "Fauci lied," she wrote on Twitter. "Louisiana and Missouri deposed Dr. Fauci. At the time, he claimed to not recall many key details of his own actions and now we are discovering contemporaneous records he kept."
That's the part that turns a bad look into a legal problem. Claiming you can't recall something under oath is one thing. Claiming you can't recall something you were simultaneously writing down in a diary is another thing entirely.
Fauci appeared before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Wednesday, July 31. The man who spent five years telling 330 million Americans exactly what to do — wear this mask, take this shot, close this school, stay in this house — suddenly couldn't manage a yes or no. His attorney's stated reason for the Fifth Amendment invocations was that answering questions "could expose him to prosecution despite former President Joe Biden's sweeping federal pardon."
The "I was just following the science" crowd will frame these investigations as political theater — red-state attorneys general playing to their base. That argument had more weight before 1,141 pages of Senate committee records started surfacing, before diary entries showed Fauci privately estimating a COVID fatality rate of 0.2-0.3% while telling Congress it was 3%, and before the man himself sat in a Senate hearing room and refused to answer more than a hundred questions.
What Murrill's announcement signals is that the federal pardon created a problem Biden didn't anticipate. A presidential pardon covers federal crimes. It does not cover state-level fraud, misrepresentation, or violations of state consumer protection statutes. Three attorneys general have now looked at the same set of facts and concluded there's enough to investigate on their own turf.
The Fifth Amendment protects you from self-incrimination. It doesn't protect you from three separate investigations in three separate jurisdictions with three separate sets of laws.