Fauci's diary reveals he recruited Obama and media allies to counter beagle-experiment scandal

Newly released diary entries show former NIAID Director Anthony Fauci coordinated with Barack Obama and a Washington Post reporter to manage fallout from allegations his agency funded painful experiments on beagle puppies.

The entries, dated October and November 2021, lay out a behind-the-scenes effort that went far beyond routine government communications. Fauci described enlisting a journalist he called one of his "media friends" to investigate his critics, used a personal Gmail account to correspond with her, and accepted an offer from Obama to intervene with Biden White House officials, all while publicly insisting his agency had nothing to do with the experiments in question.

Sen. Rand Paul, the Kentucky Republican, released the records. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said the diary entries were dug up from 11 separate government servers.

A $375,000 grant, sedated dogs, and sand flies

The underlying facts are grim. Internal grant documents show NIAID approved a $375,000 grant running from 2019 to 2020 that involved forcing the snouts of sedated beagles into mesh pouches filled with sand flies that had been starved for 24 hours. The dogs were later euthanized. When the experiments came to light in October 2021, largely through the work of White Coat Waste Project, a bipartisan watchdog group founded by a GOP strategist, bipartisan members of Congress issued a letter of condemnation.

Fauci's initial private reaction, captured in a diary entry from earlier that October, was to deny any awareness. "I have no idea what the grant is nor what they are doing in the grants and I'm asking the staff to investigate," he wrote.

That claim did not age well. Nearly three years later, on June 3, 2024, Fauci sat before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic and offered a starkly different account. "I signed off on them because they were approved by a peer review," he testified. No public explanation has surfaced for the gap between those two statements, one written in private, the other delivered under oath.

Fauci turned to a Washington Post reporter within days

The diary entries trace a rapid escalation. By October 26, 2021, Fauci had shifted from professing ignorance to framing the controversy as a political hit job. He wrote:

"It is so very clear now that this is a concerted effort to discredit me and assassinate my character. We have counted the attacks regarding the Beagle dog experiments, but still the attacks continue falsely claiming that NIAID funded the studies."

The next day, October 27, his diary records that Washington Post journalist Yasmeen Abutaleb, whom Fauci referenced more than two dozen times across the released entries, had "agreed to write a story trying to uncover the source of this organized effort to discredit me." Fauci added that he had "told her to hold back on doing any big story."

On October 28, Fauci described a longer conversation with Abutaleb. She wanted to deploy the Washington Post's investigative resources to track whether funding for the effort to discredit him could be traced to the Republican Party or another organization. "Let us see how this turns out," Fauci wrote. The following day, he emailed Abutaleb directly: "I will send you an e-mail via my gmail account."

That detail carries weight beyond the diary itself. White Coat Waste later accused Fauci of lying in House testimony when he said he had not used personal email to conduct government business. Fauci's attorney, David Schertler, has maintained the email to Abutaleb "involved a personal matter and not a matter related to government business." The distinction between a "personal matter" and a coordinated media strategy to defend an agency head's public reputation is one Schertler did not elaborate on.

Abutaleb, who now works for Reuters, did not respond to requests for comment. She published an article in November 2021 that Fauci praised in his diary as a "fantastic article" about "the false claims against me by the right wing motivated White Coat Waste project regarding the Beagle experiments." Whether the piece attempted to trace funding to the Republican Party, as Fauci's diary described Abutaleb planning, remains unclear from the available records. The pattern of coordination between a senior government figure and a major newsroom raises its own questions about editorial independence.

Obama called Fauci and offered to reach the Biden White House

The media effort was only half the operation. In early November 2021, Fauci recorded that former President Obama called him personally. Obama "expressed concern" about the attacks and offered to "call up" Ron Klain, then-President Biden's chief of staff, or other administration officials "to have the administration be proactive in countering these lies," Fauci wrote.

A November 4 diary entry captured Obama's private language about the Trump family. Fauci wrote that Obama called Donald Trump Jr. "a f***ing moron," apologized for the crude language, and then described Donald Trump as "a hopeless idiot who was a pathologic liar." Those characterizations are Fauci's account of Obama's words, not independently verified quotes.

Six days after that November 4 entry, Fauci received a follow-up call, this time from an unnamed senior adviser to Obama, about a public-relations strategy for handling the "Beaglegate" accusations. The identity of that adviser has not been disclosed. Obama's representatives did not respond to requests for comment.

The involvement of a former president in managing a sitting agency head's press crisis is unusual by any standard. Obama held no government office in 2021. His willingness to intervene with the sitting White House chief of staff on Fauci's behalf suggests a level of coordination between the former and current administrations that went beyond casual concern. Accountability questions surrounding Obama-era political networks continue to surface across multiple fronts.

Morens indicted, records destroyed, and a pattern of evasion

Fauci's use of personal email to communicate with a journalist about agency business fits a broader pattern at NIAID. David Morens, a former senior adviser to the agency's director, was indicted earlier this year for concealing and destroying federal records. Prosecutors allege Morens evaded Freedom of Information Act requests and used a private email account to communicate with grantees.

The diary entries themselves were scattered across 11 government servers, according to Kennedy. That they survived at all is notable given the record-destruction charges against Morens. The broader question of what else may have been written, and what may not have survived, remains open.

White Coat Waste's Justin Goodman, the group's senior vice president, put the revelations bluntly:

"From the moment we exposed Beaglegate, the Washington establishment, bureaucrats, politicians and the corporate media, circled the wagons to defend Fauci over his funding of deadly dog labs. Now, Fauci's own diary reveals that former President Barack Obama personally helped him coordinate a covert damage-control campaign to discredit White Coat Waste after we ignited what The Washington Post called 'the biggest firestorm yet for Fauci.'"

Goodman's characterization, that the establishment "circled the wagons", now has documentary support in Fauci's own handwriting. The diary entries show a government official who first denied knowing about a taxpayer-funded experiment, then privately orchestrated a media and political strategy to discredit the people who exposed it, then years later admitted under oath that he had approved the funding all along.

The federal government's capacity for self-investigation remains a live issue. The Justice Department has signaled a more aggressive posture on enforcement and accountability across several policy areas, but whether that energy extends to the conduct documented in these diary entries is another matter entirely.

Taxpayers funded the experiments. Taxpayers funded the agency. And when the public found out what their money paid for, the man in charge picked up the phone, not to answer for it, but to make sure the right people helped him change the subject.