(Headline USA) Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said he had confirmed that former COVID czar Anthony Fauci, who retired in December and recently accepted a position with Georgetown University, still receives a taxpayer-funded security detail.
Paul, a longtime nemesis of Fauci’s, blasted the former National Institutes of Health official, who had reportedly been the highest paid employee in the federal government, for being “treated like a president.”
Fox News revealed earlier this year that the U.S. Marshals Service began providing security for Fauci at the beginning of 2023.
Paul then sent a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra requesting additional details about Fauci’s current employment status and why, if Fauci was retired, he was still benefiting from perks reserved for active government employees.
““We asked HHS early in the summer—we said, ‘Is he still working, and does he have this limo, and does he have a driver, and does he have a security detail?'” Paul explained
“HHS actually came back to us and said they haven’t been paying for it since January,” the fiscally hawkish senator continued. “But then we discovered that Fox did a Freedom of Information Act [open records request] and a judge forced them to say that, well, while HHS wasn’t directly funding it, the U.S. Marshals were funding it.”
HHS told Paul that “somebody else is doing it and then we’re reimbursing them,” he added.
Paul said it pointed to flagrant abuses of power by the Biden administration on several different fronts.
“[I]t’s a terrible example of the government lying to its representatives and to the people,” he said. “But also, why is a retired guy, the only retired official I know of that gets this [same] kind of treatment as a former president.”
It made no sense why Fauci, a “bureaucrat, still has a limo driver security detail,” the senator said.
It was also likely that Fauci was still benefiting from other taxpayer-funded privileges, such as pro-bono legal representation.
“He may need that eventually,” Paul quipped.
Paul formally accused Fauci of perjury in a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland last week, saying he had evidence that the former COVID czar deliberately lied to Congress about the NIH’s funding of risky gain-of-function research.
Perjury is a federal offense that carries a sentence of up to five years in prison.
The accusations also come on the heels of another recent revelation that Becerra may have allowed the terms of Fauci and other health officials to expire in December 2021 in violation of 2016’s 21st Century Cures Act.
If so, Fauci spent his final year illegitimately serving in his post as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, during which time he may have illegally approved $26 billion in taxpayer-funded grants.
