Newly released diary entries from Dr. Anthony Fauci suggest ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos offered him warm praise after one of Fauci’s frequent appearances on Good Morning America during the Covid-19 pandemic.
According to Fauci’s account, Stephanopoulos sent the message after a July 2020 interview in which the longtime infectious disease official was asked about criticism coming from then-President Donald Trump.
“Thank you, Tony. So impressive,” Stephanopoulos, 65, wrote on July 28, 2020, shortly after the segment aired, Fauci recorded in his diary.
During the Good Morning America interview, Stephanopoulos opened by asking Fauci to respond to Trump’s retweets of posts that described him as a “fraud.”
“I don’t even read them, so I don’t really want to go there. I just will continue to do my job no matter what comes out,” Fauci, 85, said on the broadcast.
Fauci later summarized the moment in his diary, writing: “George asked me to respond and I blew it off.”
In the same entry, Fauci described Trump as “playing a weird game,” saying the president appeared “okay with me in person” and “to the press” while also “retweeting stuff that attacks me.”
The diary excerpt was among a batch of records released over the weekend that shed new light on Fauci’s public profile during the pandemic, when the then-head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases became one of the country’s most recognizable health officials.
‘Thank you, Tony. So impressive,’ George Stephanopoulos texted Anthony Fauci on July 28, 2020, after sharing laughs on GMA, according to the disease doctor’s pandemic-era diary entries
The diary entries were released ahead of a Wednesday Senate hearing on the federal government’s pandemic response where Fauci is testifying. He refused to answer any question related to the virus
On June 10, 2021, he sought the ‘advice’ of longtime NBC News and MSNBC anchor Chuck Todd on how to deal with barbs from figures ‘like Tucker Carlson’ at Fox News.
‘I had a really nice conversation with Chuck Todd this morning,’ Fauci wrote. ‘He had texted me to ask what I thought of the interview yesterday. I told him that I thought it was absolutely terrific, but I wanted some advice from him.
‘I asked him whether he thought that I should pull back from publicly defending myself against the slanderous attacks since that might call more attention to them.’
Fauci said Todd ‘completely agreed’ that any response would merely be fodder ‘for their next show.’
‘Chuck is really an excellent journalist and although he must maintain his objectivity and reporting it is very clear that he is really being a friend in understanding the difficult position that I am in,’ the government official wrote.
The month before, Fauci complained about Carlson’s ‘slanderous attacks.’
‘Fox News hosts Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham and mocking our attempts to get people vaccinated likely leading to loss of lives,’ he lamented that July.
‘In another vein, I continue to get harassed by letters from far-right congressmen and senators who are cherry picking my FOIA’d emails and trying to establish that I have lied under oath when I said that the NIH has never done gain of function research at the Wuhan institute of virology,’ he wrote the following week.
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On June 10, 2021, Fauci sought ‘advice’ on how to deal with barbs from figures ‘like Tucker Carlson’ at Fox News from an anchor at a rival network, his diaries show
He complained about Carlson ‘and others at Fox News continu[ing] to attack me virtually every night.
‘Carlson saying multiple times that I created the virus,’ Fauci continued.
‘This is an extremely stressful situation but I will have to push on with the job that I have as director of NIAID and as chief medical advisor to President Biden.’
Entries in August and October of 2021 offered more grumblings about Fox News, specifically ‘stooges’ Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham.
Another touted Carlson as a ‘total a**hole.’
Fauci has not been charged with, convicted of or proven to have committed any crimes.
Other entries show how he struck up a self-professed ‘friendship’ with CNN’s Jake Tapper, after the anchor and his then-colleague Chris Cuomo came to the doctor’s ‘defense on their shows.’ Fauci visited the Tapper home in DC at least twice. He also traded jokes via text with Dana Bash.
‘Press is going wild with me. Front page in Washintgton [sic] Post yesterday and Op Ed by Maureen Dowd in NY Times today about me and my relationship with the POTUS. Profile by Peter Nicholas on me in The Atlantic,’ he wrote in March 2020, just days into the crisis.
Fauci also struck up a self-professed ‘friendship’ with CNN’s Jake Tapper. The pair exchanged texts after a 2020 interview to joke about one of Tapper’s rivals at Fox, according to one of the newly released entries released to analyze his pandemic response
‘Big front page article about me appeared in the Washington Post. Very flattering,’ he wrote in May of that year.
‘It is not hyoperbole [sic] to say that today I am the most famous and talked about person in the country and one of the most recognizable person [sic] in the world.’
The relentless record-keeping lasted until December 2022, where Fauci complained: ‘It is clear (I have not been reporting it every day) that the far, extreme right and Qanon literally hate me.’ He retired from federal work that month.
The documents were released ahead of a Wednesday Senate hearing on the federal government’s pandemic response where Fauci is testifying. He refused to answer any question related to the virus, invoking the Fifth Amendment.
The emergence of COVID-19 in late 2019 is the subject of two main theories – one being a laboratory-related incident as Fauci mentioned in his entries slamming Fox, and the other natural zoonotic transmission, from animal to human.
The Daily Mail reached out to ABC News for comment.
