Anthony Fauci's personal diary entries, released by Sen. Rand Paul ahead of the former NIAID chief's Senate testimony, show Fauci recruited Barack Obama to orchestrate an administration-wide campaign to defend him from public criticism.
The diary, posted as a PDF on Sen. Paul's Senate website, includes a November 4, 2021, entry in which Fauci describes a phone call with the former president, a call Fauci's own intermediary, Leslie Dach, arranged. Obama offered to contact Jeff Zients and Ron Klain to "mobilize some of the people in the administration to proactively go out and defend" Fauci, according to the diary. He also reportedly called Donald Trump a "hopeless idiot" and a "pathologic liar," and used a profanity to describe Donald Trump Jr., all recorded in Fauci's own handwriting.
Sen. Paul, who chairs the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, released the diary package ahead of Fauci's scheduled testimony before the panel. The entries offer an unfiltered look at how a senior public health official, supposedly above politics, worked the levers of partisan power to protect his reputation while the country dealt with a pandemic.
The diary entry at the center of the release is dated November 4, 2021, a period when Fauci faced growing public backlash over reports that NIAID had funded studies involving beagle experimentation. The White Coat Waste Project, a taxpayer watchdog group, had brought attention to those studies, and Fauci was feeling the heat.
In the entry, Fauci wrote that Dach "had contacted Barack Obama to ask him to give me a call to see what he could do to counter the slanderous lies there have been coming from the far right press, extreme right elements in society, and even several members of the Senate and the House." That framing, casting all criticism as slander from the "far right", is worth noting. Some of that criticism came from bipartisan animal-welfare advocates and taxpayer groups with no ideological axe to grind.
Obama, according to Fauci's account, told him he was a "civilian" who "should not have to put with this nonsense." Obama then offered to call Zients and Klain, both senior Biden administration officials at the time, and tell them to mount a proactive defense. Fauci recorded Obama's words in his diary:
"President Obama said that he would call up Jeff Zients and tell him to mobilize some of the people in the administration to proactively go out and defend me."
A former president, out of office for nearly five years at that point, was allegedly directing sitting White House officials to run interference for a bureaucrat under public scrutiny. That arrangement raises straightforward questions about who was actually setting policy priorities inside the Biden administration, and whether the public defense of Fauci was driven by science or by political loyalty.
During the same call, Fauci wrote, he told Obama about Donald Trump Jr.'s website selling merchandise that read "Fauci kills puppies." Obama's response, as Fauci recorded it, was blunt. Obama called Trump Jr. "a f***ing moron," then "apologized for using crude language" before going on to call Donald Trump "a hopeless idiot who was a pathologic liar."
Those are Fauci's words describing what Obama said. Obama has not publicly confirmed or denied the account. But the diary entry is Fauci's own contemporaneous record, written for himself, not for public consumption, which lends the account a rawness that polished press statements lack. Obama's willingness to trade sharp words about Trump behind closed doors, while maintaining a carefully curated public image, fits a pattern his critics have long identified.
Fauci also recorded that Obama was "very upset that none of the moderate Republicans were actually speaking out on my behalf and were distancing themselves from all of this terrible slanderous behavior against me." The former president apparently expected Republicans to rally around a government official whose agency was under legitimate scrutiny, and was frustrated when they declined.
The diary entries show the Obama call was not a one-off gesture. Days after the November 4, 2021, entry, Fauci wrote that he spoke with Eric Schultz "at the request of Barack Obama." Fauci used that follow-up conversation to praise articles that defended him against the White Coat Waste Project's revelations.
The sequence is plain: Fauci's intermediary contacted Obama. Obama called Fauci. Obama offered to activate Biden administration officials. Obama then connected Fauci with Schultz to continue coordinating. That is not a casual check-in from a concerned former president. It is a structured effort to manage a political problem.
Justin Goodman, senior vice president of the White Coat Waste Project, said the diary confirms what his organization long suspected. Obama's willingness to work behind the scenes while projecting a different public posture is not lost on the group.
"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.'"
The Obama phone call is the most politically significant entry, but it is not the only revealing one. Fauci's diary entries describe his pandemic-era fame as "explosive and really unimaginable." He wrote about receiving "dozens of calls" on his personal cell phone via FaceTime from unrecognized numbers, which he attributed to people harassing him over the beagle studies.
In one passage, Fauci wrote:
"It is so very clear now that this is a concerted effort to discredit me and assassinate my character. We have counted [sic] the attacks regarding the Beagle dog experiments, but still the attacks continue falsely claiming that NIAID funded the studies."
Fauci cast every challenge to his record as a personal attack, every question as slander. That posture, treating legitimate oversight as harassment, defined much of the public health establishment's approach during the pandemic. Sen. Paul's long-running effort to compel Fauci's testimony and investigate COVID-19 origins has faced exactly this kind of resistance at every stage.
And the diary entries sit alongside Fauci's broader public record. In April 2022, Fauci stated publicly: "You use lockdowns to get people vaccinated so that when you open up, you won't have a surge of infections." That admission, that lockdowns were a tool to push vaccination, not simply a medical necessity, landed differently for the millions of Americans who lost businesses, missed funerals, and watched their children fall behind in school.
The Trump administration later stopped NIH beagle experimentation, a move that underscored the legitimacy of the concerns Fauci dismissed as "slanderous lies."
Several questions remain open. Did Klain or Zients actually follow through on Obama's alleged directive to mobilize the administration in Fauci's defense? The diary records the offer but does not document the result, beyond Fauci's follow-up call with Schultz. Neither Obama, Klain, nor Zients has confirmed or denied the account as described in the diary.
The roles of Dach and Schultz in the broader effort are also unclear. The diary does not identify Dach's title or organizational affiliation, nor does it explain Schultz's role beyond being someone Obama directed Fauci to contact. The full scope and date range of the diary remain unknown. Obama's public posture toward Trump has been carefully managed for years, and the diary's account of his private language adds a layer the former president has not addressed.
Fauci himself has not publicly responded to the release of the diary entries.
What the diary does show, in Fauci's own words, is a government official who treated public accountability as a personal attack, recruited a former president to run political defense, and worked to coordinate that defense through sitting White House officials, all while presenting himself as a nonpartisan servant of science. The relationships between former and sitting presidents carry weight, and when those relationships are used to shield bureaucrats from legitimate scrutiny, taxpayers deserve to know.
When the man who locked down the country and told Americans to "follow the science" needed help, he didn't call a scientist. He called a politician.