Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) released Fauci’s diary over the weekend, publishing more than 1,000 pages of personal entries the former NIAID director wrote during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Kentucky senator, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, posted the documents on X on Saturday, July 25, 2026, describing them as diary entries Dr. Anthony Fauci kept from December 2019 through December 2022.
Paul framed the release as proof that Fauci said one thing publicly and something very different in private. “What he wrote privately and what he told the country are two different stories,” Paul wrote alongside the thread announcing the release. The timing was not accidental. Fauci is scheduled to testify before Paul’s committee on Wednesday, July 29, 2026, and the diary drop landed just days before that high-profile hearing.
How Rand Paul obtained the diary remains unclear
Neither Paul’s office nor Fauci responded to multiple outlets, including NPR and CBS News, when asked how the committee obtained the 85-year-old scientist’s personal journal. Fauci also declined to comment to CBS News about the release itself. The lack of an explanation has left reporters and readers wondering whether the entries came through a records request, a subpoena, or another channel entirely.
What is confirmed: the document runs 1,141 pages and covers roughly three years of Fauci’s tenure leading the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases during the pandemic response. Paul’s committee posted the file publicly, then briefly took it down on Monday evening before reposting it Tuesday morning with redactions applied.
A subpoena set the stage for this moment
The diary release did not happen in isolation. Paul issued a subpoena to Fauci on June 23, 2026, after six months of negotiations over a voluntary appearance broke down. Paul said Fauci initially agreed to testify, then backed out, prompting the committee chairman to compel his attendance through legal means.
“For six months, I have been negotiating with Anthony Fauci’s lawyers over a date to testify before my Homeland Security Committee. He finally agreed to appear this month. Then he backed out. So I subpoenaed him,” Paul wrote at the time. He added that Fauci would face questions about gain-of-function research funding, destroyed records, and the presidential pardon he received before leaving office.
Fauci received a preemptive pardon from former President Joe Biden before Biden left the White House, a move the Biden administration said was meant to shield Fauci from “unjustified and politically motivated prosecutions” under the incoming administration. That pardon has become one of Paul’s recurring talking points and is expected to surface again during Wednesday’s hearing.
What is actually inside the diary
The entries reveal a mix of professional reflection and personal candor. Fauci wrote extensively about his sudden fame early in the pandemic, at times calling the press attention “flattering” while also describing the pressure it created inside the White House.
In one entry, Fauci described a wave of coverage that included a Washington Post front page, an op-ed by Maureen Dowd in the New York Times, and a magazine profile by Peter Nicholas in The Atlantic. He wrote that the White House grew upset, believing the coverage made it look like he was overshadowing President Donald Trump. “Apparently the WH is very upset that I am being profiled and it looks like I am putting down the POTUS and becoming a star that outshines him,” he wrote, adding that the tweet storm around the coverage was “very stressful.”
Fauci also privately complained about Trump’s speaking style during task force briefings, describing the president’s remarks as “rambling” in multiple entries. The diary shows a working relationship that started out relatively warm before deteriorating as the pandemic dragged on, according to entries reviewed by the Washington Post. His relationship with then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows also soured over the course of 2020, based on the notes.
Several entries touch directly on COVID-19’s origins. In a January 2020 entry, Fauci wrote that “we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier,” while also noting that “somewhere the virus jumped from animals to humans.” That early uncertainty is now central to Paul’s argument that Fauci misled the public about how confident scientists actually were in the early weeks of the outbreak.
School closures and city-level guidance
One of the most scrutinized sections involves a March 2020 entry describing Fauci’s role in New York City’s decision to close schools. Fauci wrote that he “convinced” then-Mayor Bill de Blasio, “based on what I was saying publicly and my conversation tonight,” to shut down the city’s schools, and separately advised that de Blasio “should close the bars and restaurants in NYC.”
The entry goes on to say Fauci “had a similar call” with Ann O’Leary, who at the time served as chief of staff to California Gov. Gavin Newsom. Critics have compared these entries to a 2022 interview in which Fauci said he had “nothing to do” with school closures, arguing the diary contradicts that public statement.
Celebrities, journalists, and unexpected names
The diary also documents an unusually personal side of Fauci’s pandemic-era life. Entries describe phone calls and dinners at CNN anchor Jake Tapper’s Washington home, along with Tapper privately checking whether an interview had caused friction with the White House.
Other names that surface throughout the pages include Julia Roberts, Steph Curry, Larry Ellison, and Hunter Biden. Perhaps the most unexpected thread involves singer Barbra Streisand, a fellow Brooklyn native, who reportedly reached out to Fauci directly for medical advice, including whether she and her husband, actor James Brolin, should get COVID-19 booster shots. The diary indicates the two kept in touch by phone over time.
The final entry
The diary entries end in December 2022, around the time Fauci stepped down from NIAID after leading the institute for decades. In his last recorded entry, Fauci reflected on the hostility directed at him from certain political corners, writing, “It is clear (I have not been reporting it every day) that the far, extreme right and Qanon literally hate me.”
Why the timing matters
The Fauci diary release lands just two days before Fauci’s scheduled appearance before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. That hearing is set for Wednesday, July 29, 2026, at 10:00 a.m. ET, according to committee scheduling confirmed this week. Paul has said he expects the exchange to be combative, telling Fox Business, “I expect he will not tell the truth. I don’t expect him to be honest, he hasn’t been honest in the last six years.”
Fauci has testified before Congress roughly 250 times over his long career, addressing threats ranging from HIV/AIDS to Ebola. Wednesday’s hearing will mark his first appearance before Paul’s committee since the diary release and only his second public congressional appearance since leaving government service, following a June 2024 hearing before a House subcommittee.
Background on the Paul-Fauci feud
Paul and Fauci have clashed publicly since 2020, most notably over whether NIH-affiliated grants supported gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. Paul has repeatedly accused Fauci of misleading Congress on this point, an allegation Fauci has consistently denied. Federal scientific bodies have generally backed Fauci’s characterization of the research in question, though the debate over COVID-19’s origins remains unsettled at the government level.
The FBI has assessed that the coronavirus most likely emerged from a lab incident in Wuhan, while the CIA issued a January 2025 assessment favoring the lab-leak hypothesis, albeit with what it called “low confidence.” Many scientists continue to point to evidence suggesting the virus spread naturally from infected bats through a market in Wuhan, where the earliest human cases were identified in late 2019.
Quick timeline of key dates
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| June 23, 2026 | Rand Paul subpoenas Fauci to testify |
| July 25, 2026 | Paul publishes over 1,000 pages of Fauci’s diary on X |
| July 27, 2026 | Diary document briefly removed, then reposted with redactions |
| July 29, 2026 | Fauci scheduled to testify before Senate Homeland Security Committee |
What happens next
All eyes are now on Wednesday’s hearing, where Paul is expected to press Fauci directly on the diary’s contents, the origins of gain-of-function research funding, and the circumstances surrounding his pardon. Fauci has not indicated publicly how he plans to respond to specific diary entries, and his legal team has not issued a statement addressing the document’s authenticity in detail.
For now, the released pages stand as the most detailed public window yet into Fauci’s private thinking during the most consequential public health crisis of his career, and the hearing that follows is likely to keep the story in the headlines for days to come.
Stay tuned as this story develops and let us know what you think Fauci should be asked on Wednesday.