Crazy Larry O’Donnell On Fauci Hearing: 'The Most Disgraceful Stalinist Tribunal'

Siena Do
July 31st, 2026 4:21 PM

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On Wednesday, Dr. Anthony Fauci sat before the Senate Homeland Security Committee, where the pre-pardoned former COVID czar pleaded the Fifth 111 times. The Republican senators grilled Fauci on the pandemic, its origins, and the contents of his recently-released diary but as Fauci was humiliated and drew even more justified suspicion upon himself, the leftist media fell over themselves in his defense.

Lawrence O’Donnell on MS NOW’s The Last Word wondered how a saint like Fauci could ever be doubted about anything, while also labeling the hearing “the most disgraceful Stalinist tribunal the United States Senate has ever seen.” 

If it was truly a Stalinist tribunal, Fauci would have been executed. But hyperbole comes naturally to this lecturer.

There should have been heroic music playing as O'Donnell proclaimed that Fauci is "a man who has done more in service to this country and the world than every senator in that room and the entire current United States Senate combined," before playing a clip of Connecticut’s Democrat Senator Richard Blumenthal calling the hearing “one of the darkest days in our Senate's history.” “That’s exactly what it was,” O’Donnell agreed. “Republican senators disgraced themselves today, attacking the man who saved lives, possibly millions of lives, during the COVID-19 outbreak.”

 

 

And about Fauci’s diary that was recently released? It read “as a straightforward description, an actual accounting of what was happening to him every day, almost all of which is about the virus he was trying to conquer,” according to O’Donnell.

In fact, you shouldn’t believe your lying eyes that anything in his diary proved Fauci was an egomaniacal fame-chaser. “There's no excitement, there's no glee about the surge in his fame,” O’Donnell claimed.

 

 

If O’Donnell had actually read the diary, he would’ve seen lines like "Intense publicity about me continues with stories of grandmothers who have crushes on men. Petitions to vote me ‘Sexiest Man Alive,’" "Press still hot and heavy about me,” and "One person said that Tyra [Banks] was sexy, but I was even more sexy than she was.”

“Dr. Fauci has been accused of name-dropping in his diary, which is impossible, because he's name-dropping in a document that no one else was ever supposed to read,” O’Donnell said.

Then why was the diary kept on a government computer? A genius like Fauci should have known better than to expect permanent privacy on a government-owned device. Most of those devices warn the user before they log in that their activity, let alone documents saved on that device, can be easily accessed. Also, even if you name-drop in a private journal, it’s still definitely name-dropping. 

At one point, O'Donnell played a clip of Fauci attributing the hearing to Paul’s “unhinged obsession with me.” Even if that were true, Paul’s would pale in comparison to Fauci’s “unhinged obsession” with himself. 

 

 

O’Donnell called the hearing a "Stalinist tribunal” and then, he couldn’t help but make a jab at Donald Trump and Elon Musk:

Not one Republican senator is investigating how many thousands of people have died because Donald Trump and Elon Musk took their life-saving HIV medicine away. Not one Republican Congressional committee is investigating how many babies have starved to death because Elon Musk decided to let food supplies that had already been delivered to Africa rot in warehouses instead of distributing that food to starving people. That is the Republican contribution to public health in today's world. 

 

 

Nobody expected the liberal media to turn on Fauci, but it’s still surprising to see how hard they’re doubling down. In their godless fantasy world, Fauci is a saint, and, if you ask O’Donnell, “All of us owe our gratitude to Anthony Fauci. And many of us may owe our lives to Anthony Fauci.”

The transcript is below. Click “expand” to read:

MS NOW's The Last Word
7/29/26
10:02:55 p.m. Eastern

LAWRENCE O'DONNELL: Bernie Moreno's target in that hearing today was a man who has done more in service to this country and the world than every senator in that room and the entire current United States Senate combined, Dr. Anthony Fauci. 

(...)

10:04:52 p.m.

O'DONNELL: The New York Times called today's hearing, quote, "A useless drama that offered zero insights." 

The chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, Rand Paul, who called today's hearing, has, for years, falsely claimed that Dr. Fauci refused to ever consider the possibility that COVID-19 originated in an infectious disease laboratory in Wuhan, China. Dr. Fauci has said repeatedly for years that he did consider that theory. He has examined possible sources of the virus, including a deliberate or accidental leak from that lab in China, and Dr. Fauci has concluded that it is more likely to have originated in nature. 

Like most scientists studying the issue, Dr. Fauci has never said the exact origin of the COVID-19 virus has been scientifically proved.

Rand Paul released a thousand pages of Dr. Fauci's diary-like notes that Dr. Fauci kept on his office computer, which remained in government custody when he left government service.

The New York Times reports, quote, "The diary does not provide the smoking gun the senator is seeking. Rather, it echoes past disclosures showing Dr. Fauci wrestling with a fast-moving crisis as scientists' views evolved."  

In fact, the diary entries show that in the earliest days of Dr. Fauci's concern about COVID-19, before most of us had even heard of COVID-19, Dr. Fauci was convening a meeting to discuss the possibility of the Wuhan lab having leaked the virus accidentally or deliberately, and that diary information is not news because in February of 2020, before most of us even began to worry about COVID-19, Dr. Fauci told USA Today that they were considering "the possibility of a lab leak" as the origin.

Senator Richard Blumenthal reminded the committee of those dark days in 2020.

[Cut to video]

SEN. RICHARD BLUMENTHAL (D-CT): I want to go back to the dark days of the Coronavirus pandemic, one of the darkest days, or times in our history. 

Hospitals were overflowing. Navy medical ships were docked in the Hudson River. Emergency rooms were forced into unprecedented triaging during the worst week of the pandemic, which happens to have been the last week of President Trump's first term.  

More than 25,000 Americans died of COVID-19. Easy to forget those dark days.  

But for the past 18 months, the Trump administration has been engaged in a campaign to rewrite this history. And today's proceeding, I fear, is part of that effort. 

One of the darkest days in our Senate's history.

[Cut back to live]

O'DONNELL: "One of the darkest days in our Senate's history." That is exactly what it was.  

Republican senators disgraced themselves today, attacking the man who saved lives, possibly millions of lives, during the COVID-19 outbreak. The man who helped speed the development of a vaccine because of the research that he had led and supported on exactly that kind of virus for years before the outbreak of the pandemic, in anticipation of exactly the kind of pandemic that hit the world in 2020. That's why that vaccine that has saved so many of our lives reached us so quickly.  

And not one senator in that room today did one thing to save a single life during the COVID-19 pandemic, not one of them. But they lined up to get their COVID-19 vaccine shots as soon as they possibly could, and they never thanked Dr. Fauci for helping speed the development of that vaccine.

(...) 

10:11:51 p.m. 

O'DONNELL: Some news accounts of Dr. Fauci's diary read - which reads as a straightforward description, an actual accounting of what was happening to him every day, almost all of which is about the virus he was trying to conquer, find fault with Dr. Fauci for recording things that actually happened to him, like phone calls with Barbra Streisand and other celebrities.  

Dr. Fauci has been accused of name-dropping in his diary, which is impossible, because he's name-dropping in a document that no one else was ever supposed to read.  

He mentions names like Robert de Niro, Al Pacino, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Francis Ford Coppola, all in the same sentence, actually, because he mentions them in a diary entry about receiving the Leonardo da Vinci Award from the Italian American Foundation, and so, yeah, some famous Italian Americans were there. The most famous Italian Americans were there. And I don't know anyone who's met those people who hasn't made some kind of note about it and told someone about it.  

And so Dr. Fauci mentioned those names to his diary, where there is no bragging - there's no bragging in that diary. It's a record of who he met, of who he talked to.

There's no excitement. There's no glee about the surge in his fame that he records in his diary. 

He marvels at the weirdness of it, as has every single person in the history of massive, rocketing surges in personal fame. Whenever that happens, people find it strange and disorienting. And that's what Dr. Fauci records, that it was strange and disorienting.  

Ninety-nine percent of his diary during the COVID-19 pandemic is about the COVID-19 pandemic. There is nothing in the diary that reeks of vanity.  

Rand Paul has said that Dr. Fauci should be in prison without ever once having named an actual crime that Dr. Fauci could ever be charged with.  

Anthony Fauci, who has testified to Congress, possibly more than any other American in history, decided that today would be different.

[Cut to video]

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member Peters, members of the committee, I served at the NIH for over 54 years, 38 of those as Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.  

Over that period, I proved that I believe in and respect the value of legitimate Congressional oversight. In fact, I testified before and/or briefed Senate and House Congressional over— Senate and House committees well over 200 times over those 38 years. During and after the COVID pandemic, I have appeared multiple times for hearings in the Senate and the House, usually under oath, and sat for several days-long, transcribed, sworn interviews, answering questions about the very issues that are now the subject of this hearing.  

However, 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, quote, "Behind bars," unquote. 

Any reasonable person who has followed his unhinged obsession with me would readily come to the same conclusion.

Therefore, although it pains me to do so, because of the respect I have for the legislative branch of government and my decades-long record of cooperating with Congress, under the advice of my attorneys, I will invoke my right under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution to refrain from answering your questions. Thank you.

[Cut back to live]

O'DONNELL: And that led Rand Paul to turn his hearing room into the most disgraceful Stalinist tribunal the United States Senate has ever seen.

 (...) 

10:19:44 p.m.

O'DONNELL: Throwing the lawyer out of the room. 

Joe McCarthy, at his worst, never do - did that. Joe McCarthy was an alcoholic Republican senator conducting phony witch hunts of suspected communists in the 1950s in a Senate hearing room. And he never did, never did what Rand Paul did today, throw the lawyer out of the room.  

That is how weak and lost and deranged a committee chairman, Rand Paul, is.  

Senator Blumenthal was right. It was "one of the darkest days in our Senate's history." Anthony Fauci helped save millions of lives with his work on HIV medications. 

He expanded his life-saving reach to Africa with the support of George W. Bush by creating a president's emergency fund to support AIDS treatment in Africa that saved over 25 million lives, before Elon Musk and Donald Trump decided that those lives were not worth saving.  

Not one Republican Congressional committee, not one Republican senator, is investigating how many thousands of people have died because Donald Trump and Elon Musk took their life-saving HIV medicine away. Not one Republican Congressional committee is investigating how many babies have starved to death because Elon Musk decided to let food supplies that had already been delivered to Africa rot in warehouses instead of distributing that food to starving people.  

That is the Republican contribution to public health in today's world.  

And not one Republican senator has ever objected to taking that food assistance away from starving children and starving mothers and starving grandmothers, and taking life-saving medicine away from people who cannot get that life-saving medicine any other way, the life-saving medicine that Doctor Anthony Fauci helped them get.

There is no higher calling than saving lives. There is nothing we could ever do more important than saving a single life. And most of us will never know that feeling of saving a life. 

And all of us owe our gratitude to Anthony Fauci. And many of us may owe our lives to Anthony Fauci. 

And Anthony Fauci owes nothing to Republicans in the United States Senate. He does not owe them an answer to a single question. He's already answered every one of the questions that they were throwing around that room today. He's answered them many times in Congressional testimony and in other interviews. Every one of them, every one of those questions, he's answered in previous appearances. 

Sometimes, news stories come down to a very simple right and wrong, and this is one of them. Anthony Fauci is right. And every one of those Republican senators is very, very wrong. 

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