Dr. Jay Bhattacharya has been pushing back against suggestions that vaccine hesitancy stemming from pandemic-era policy failures should discourage parents from sending children to school, while separately emphasizing that eroded public trust traces directly back to unaddressed 2020-era missteps. Dan Proft welcomed Joseph Moreno, a former federal prosecutor with the Department of Justice’s National Security Division, a former staff member with the FBI’s 9/11 Review Commission, and a U.S. Army combat veteran, to discuss the prospects for holding Dr. Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress following his repeated invocation of the Fifth Amendment during recent Senate testimony.
Moreno said he found Fauci’s refusal to answer nearly any question troubling from a good-governance standpoint, but explained that from a defense attorney’s perspective, remaining silent represents the cautious legal approach given ongoing state and federal scrutiny. He noted the legal ambiguity created by Fauci’s blanket pardon from the Biden administration, which theoretically shields him from federal prosecution for conduct predating 2025 but leaves open questions about whether prosecutors might attempt to circumvent that protection. Moreno said pursuing a contempt prosecution against an 85-year-old defendant, given recent precedent including the vacated conviction of Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro’s still-pending appeal, may be less practically valuable than securing Fauci’s actual testimony through a grant of immunity, particularly given that investigators have recovered roughly 34,000 messages from his phone that remain under review.
Addressing potential state-level prosecution, including reported investigative interest from Florida, Moreno said establishing jurisdiction and a substantive legal theory would prove difficult, though he acknowledged a sufficiently motivated prosecutor could likely construct some form of obstruction or false-statement charge tied to Fauci’s influence over state-level pandemic policy, even if such a case faced significant legal hurdles.
The conversation turned to newly declassified documents revealing that more than 600,000 voter registration records in Arizona’s Maricopa County were compromised in a 2020 hacking incident, with federal, state, and county prosecutors all declining to pursue charges before the case was closed in 2023. Moreno said he remains troubled by the scale of voter roll increases in 2020, questioning why registration numbers surged so significantly that year only to decline again by 2024, and expressed frustration that officials publicly described the 2020 election as free of security vulnerabilities despite documented breaches. He argued that transparency about identified vulnerabilities, even those that did not affect election outcomes, would do more to restore public confidence than continued denial, and questioned why basic voter identification and citizenship verification measures continue to face significant political resistance.
Moreno closed by discussing the confirmation of Todd Blanche as attorney general, disclosing his decade-long personal and professional relationship with Blanche as former law partners. Moreno described Blanche as highly qualified given his experience as a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York and his recent tenure as deputy attorney general, arguing that role provided him hands-on insight into the department’s operations that positions him well to lead it, while acknowledging Blanche will need to recuse himself from matters involving his prior representation of President Trump.