House Oversight Chairman James Comer is demanding answers from former HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra over allegations he concealed Dr. Anthony Fauci's pandemic-era diary and cellphone, records that now contradict Fauci's own sworn testimony.
Comer, a Kentucky Republican, sent a letter to Becerra on Monday accusing the former Biden Cabinet official of failing to turn over more than 1,000 pages of Fauci's personal diary entries in response to a November 2, 2023, congressional document request. That request specifically sought records containing the words "COVID-19," "gain-of-function," and "Wuhan." All three terms, Comer wrote, appear throughout the diary. Becerra never produced a single page, and never even acknowledged the diary existed, Fox News Digital reported.
The diary and Fauci's government cellphone only reached congressional investigators earlier this year, after current HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. handed them over to Sens. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin. Both Republicans had been running separate oversight investigations into Fauci's conduct during the pandemic. The question now facing Becerra, who is currently running for governor of California, is whether he deliberately hid the records or simply failed to search for them.
The chairman's letter did not hold back about what the committee believes went wrong. Comer wrote that the diary was "clearly relevant and responsive" to the original 2023 request and that Becerra's failure to produce it raises serious concerns.
In the letter, Comer stated:
"These terms, among others outlined in the document request, appear throughout Dr. Fauci's diary. Despite the existence of this clearly relevant and responsive information, you failed to include any portion of Dr. Fauci's diary in your response, let alone even acknowledge its existence."
He followed with a pointed framing of the committee's suspicion:
"The Committee is concerned that you either intentionally withheld this information, or that you failed to conduct an adequate search of the Department's systems as requested in the November 2, 2023, letter."
Comer gave Becerra a September 2 deadline to respond. Among the questions: whether Becerra knew the diary existed, why it was left out of his response, and whether any fellow Biden administration officials pressured him to withhold anything from the 2023 request. Fox News Digital reached out to Becerra's gubernatorial campaign for comment but received no response.
The diary's contents have already created problems for Fauci. In June 2024, testifying before the House Oversight Committee's pandemic subcommittee, a panel that has since been dissolved, Fauci told lawmakers that school closure policies were not his doing. "The CDC was responsible for those kinds of guidelines to schools, not me," he said under oath.
But a 2020 diary entry tells a different story. Fauci wrote that he "convinced" then-New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio "based on what I was saying publicly and my conversation tonight to close the NYC schools." That entry directly undercuts the claim that Fauci played no role in school shutdowns, a policy that kept millions of children out of classrooms and whose consequences are still being measured.
The diary also revealed Fauci reflecting on his newfound fame during the pandemic, though the specific content of those reflections was not detailed in the committee's public disclosures.
Sen. Paul released nearly 1,600 pages of Fauci diary entries covering December 2019 through December 2022, with a second set spanning April 2001 to July 2015. But how those records came to light remains murky. RFK Jr. gave two conflicting accounts. In one version, he told Fox News host Laura Ingraham on July 27 that his team spent eight months digging the diaries "out of 11 separate servers where they had been sequestered and secreted." In another, he said they were discovered through a subpoena of Fauci's emails, the Washington Examiner reported.
HHS confirmed that the diaries are government records, stating they were "collected, searched, and produced from a server containing Dr. Fauci's emails and other official files in response to Senator Rand Paul's oversight request." Fauci's own representatives declined to provide clear answers about the documents' origins.
House Oversight Chairman Comer connected the dots between Becerra's non-production and the diary's eventual surfacing. "Based on the release of Dr. Fauci's diary, which should have been provided to the House Oversight Committee last Congress but was withheld by then-HHS Secretary Becerra, we'll be asking Dr. Fauci whether he stands by his previous testimony to our Committee," Comer said.
The diary controversy arrived on the heels of Fauci's combative appearance before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on July 29. There, Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination more than 100 times, refusing to answer senators' questions about his pandemic-era conduct. The Senate committee subsequently held Fauci in contempt.
Sen. Paul, who has clashed with Fauci for years over gain-of-function research funding and the origins of COVID-19, sought civil contempt charges after Fauci's repeated refusal to testify. Paul has argued that Fauci's stonewalling is itself evidence that the former health official has something to hide, a position that the diary's contradictions with Fauci's prior testimony have only strengthened.
Fauci's legal exposure is not limited to Congress. Paul has continued to press for criminal accountability at the federal level.
Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill has stated that Fauci could face up to five years in state prison if convicted of perjury. The potential charges stem from a joint investigation conducted by the attorneys general of Louisiana, Florida, and West Virginia, all Republicans, into Fauci's actions during the pandemic. State-level prosecution would operate independently of any federal pardon Fauci received from President Biden, Fox News reported.
The three-state probe has also subpoenaed Fauci over allegations that he personally profited from his COVID guidance, a separate but overlapping thread in the broader accountability effort.
Adding weight to the pattern of concealment, Fauci's former senior adviser David Morens pleaded guilty to conspiracy to conceal COVID-19 records related to grant funding. Morens had edited a press release concerning grant funding, conduct Fauci himself described as "inappropriate" during his June 2024 House testimony. Fauci also acknowledged that Morens violated federal health policy by editing a letter sent to the National Institutes of Health.
Morens's guilty plea is part of a broader pattern of record destruction and concealment that has dogged Fauci's inner circle. The question congressional investigators keep returning to is straightforward: if the people closest to Fauci were hiding records, and the Biden administration's own HHS secretary failed to produce a 1,000-page diary that sat on government servers, who exactly was looking out for the public's right to know?
Becerra has until September 2 to answer Comer's questions. Whether he responds, and what he says, will determine whether this remains a matter of congressional oversight or escalates into something with sharper legal teeth.
Americans spent years being told to trust the experts. They deserve to know why the experts spent those same years making sure nobody could check their work.
