Biden’s Pardon Can’t Save Fauci From Florida
Joe Biden’s autopen pardoned Anthony Fauci for federal offenses. It cannot — by definition, by constitutional law, by every principle of American federalism — pardon him for state offenses. And Florida’s Attorney General James Uthmeier just announced his office is launching an investigation to find out whether any of those exist.
“Fauci’s lack of candor to Congress is unbelievable
Uthmeier posted Wednesday after watching Fauci plead the Fifth 111 times before the Senate Homeland Security Committee. “My office is launching an investigation into Dr. Fauci. It’s past time we get the truth of what happened during COVID.” This is potentially the most consequential development in the Fauci accountability saga — more consequential, in some ways, than Rand Paul’s contempt vote threat — because it operates in a legal space that Biden’s sweeping federal pardon cannot touch. The constitutional principle here is elementary and absolute. Presidential pardons apply only to federal offenses. A president of the United States has no power whatsoever over state criminal law. He cannot pardon someone for violating Florida statutes. He cannot preemptively immunize someone from state investigation. He cannot extend his clemency authority one inch beyond the federal criminal code. Whatever Biden’s autopen signed in January 2025 covers — and the scope and validity of those pardons remains genuinely contested — it covers federal offenses only.
Which means if Uthmeier’s investigation finds evidence that Fauci made false statements to Florida officials
or participated in conduct that violated Florida law, or any other state-level offense — Biden’s pardon is completely, totally, legally irrelevant to what happens next. Fauci knows this. That’s partly why he pleaded the Fifth 111 times rather than simply pointing to the pardon and talking freely. A pardon doesn’t protect you from state charges. It doesn’t protect you from perjury committed after the pardon was issued. It doesn’t protect you from newly discovered conduct outside its scope. And it certainly doesn’t protect you from a Florida attorney general who just watched you refuse to answer whether a folder was sitting on the table in front of you and decided he’d seen enough. The left will immediately frame Uthmeier’s investigation as political — a Republican fishing expedition designed to punish a man who is already pardoned. That framing fails for a simple reason: Fauci’s own private journal, now publicly released by Rand Paul, documents a man whose private views and public statements were in direct and systematic contradiction. His diary entries about being a “rockstar” and a victim of “jealousy” from colleagues who wouldn’t let him do more TV interviews are embarrassing. His private acknowledgment that COVID likely came from the Wuhan lab, while he publicly promoted natural origin theories that kept federal research funding out of the conversation, is potentially criminal.
Biden can’t pardon state charges. He already used his federal pardon. And Florida just opened a door that autopen cannot close
