Can American Justice Beat Biden’s Fauci Pardon?

For five years, Dr. Anthony Fauci told Congress something that wasn’t true. In May 2021, under oath, he declared that the “NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” When Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) pressed him again and warned him plainly about the legal stakes of lying to Congress, Fauci doubled down, insisting he had “never lied before the Congress” and would not retract the statement.

This was a lie. A 2023 Government Accountability Office review found that the Wuhan Institute of Virology and Wuhan University did, in fact, receive National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding for research that spliced bat coronaviruses with Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) strains to create hybrid viruses. In 2024, NIH’s own principal deputy director admitted to Congress that the U.S. government funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan. And a 2020 email written by Fauci himself, months before his sworn denial, shows he privately understood that “scientists in Wuhan University are known to have been working on gain-of-function experiments.”

He knew. He said otherwise under oath anyway. That is the textbook definition of federal perjury.

So why didn’t the Trump Justice Department bring charges against him?

The statute of limitations for charging Fauci for his perjurious 2021 testimony expired on May 11, 2026, and nothing happened.

This is especially inexcusable now, with Fauci’s newly released emails and “diary” entries laying bare a pattern of deception that shaped public health policy and wrought consequences the country is still living with.

That Fauci received a sweeping preemptive pardon from President Joe Biden in 2025 is no excuse. In fact, Fauci’s pardon is precisely why the Trump DOJ should have pursued this case.

Though preemptive presidential pardons for crimes not yet charged or investigated have long been upheld, the sweeping nature of Biden’s pardon for Fauci (and the many other allies and family members who received such immunity as Biden was walking out the door) is truly unprecedented. It declared Fauci immune from prosecution for any federal offenses committed between January 1, 2014 and January 19, 2025 — an 11-year window that covers virtually anything related to his government role during the COVID-19 pandemic. Notably, the start of this pardon period just so happens to coincide with Fauci’s decision to keep funding gain-of-function-adjacent research in China, even though a federal pause on such research had already been in place.

Biden’s pardon for Fauci did not identify a crime. It didn’t name an offense, a case, or even a specific act. It covered, in essence, whatever Fauci “may have committed” across 11 years of government service — a category so open-ended that neither Fauci, nor Biden, nor anyone else could say what it actually forgives.

Every prior preemptive pardon at least gestured toward a known controversy. President Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon, for example, was understood to be about Watergate. Likewise, President Jimmy Carter’s preemptive pardon of Vietnam War draft evaders was tied to one specific, named offense category: violations of the Military Selective Service Act.

Biden’s pardon of Fauci names no scandal, no incident, no allegation at all. It simply immunizes him from whatever he “may have committed” over 11 years and across four separate government roles.

Therein lies the problem. As vast as the presidential pardon power may be, one universally accepted boundary is that a president cannot pardon a future crime, because until an act occurs, there is no “offense against the United States” to forgive — only a speculation.

But that logic doesn’t stop at future crimes. If a pardon cannot cover an act because it is merely speculative and unidentified, the same must be true of an unidentified past act. Biden did not pardon Fauci for a specific, named offense arising from a known set of facts. He pardoned him for whatever might turn out to have happened — a category of conduct nobody had investigated, charged, or even fully described, spanning a decade. That is not meaningfully different from pardoning a future crime.

By charging Fauci with perjury, the Trump DOJ would have done two things at once: forced the judiciary to finally reckon with just how far the pardon power really extends, and made clear that accountability still exists for the public official most responsible for the harm the pandemic inflicted.

Perhaps the DOJ did not want to go down that road because President Trump himself sees value in preserving the option of sweeping preemptive immunity for his own family and allies before he leaves office. Given the lawfare campaign Democrats have already waged against him, that instinct is understandable.

But if that’s the case, the Trump DOJ owes the country a second-best option: full cooperation with everyone else still trying to hold Fauci accountable, including state prosecutors, congressional Republicans, and the families pursuing civil suits of their own.

Fauci belongs behind bars. How he gets there matters far less than whether he finally does.

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Kaylee McGhee White is a Fox News contributor and the editor-in-chief of Independent Women Features, the grassroots storytelling arm of Independent Women.