President Donald Trump has terminated Dr. Anthony Fauci’s security cover, which was being provided and paid for by the National Institutes of Health, a source familiar with the situation said. It was removed on Thursday night.
Given that he has faced persistent threats due to his public role during the Covid-19 pandemic, Fauci has now hired his own personal security guard, which he will pay for himself.
This comes as Trump continues his vendetta tour against officials working under him. He has also withdrawn security cover from former National Security Adviser John Bolton and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
“I think you know, when you work for the government … at some point, you run out of security guards, and you know, you can’t keep them forever,” Trump said Friday in North Carolina, where he was touring hurricane damage.
Asked by CNN’s Betsy Klein if he would feel partly responsible if something happened to Fauci or Bolton, Trump said no.
“They all made a lot of money. They can hire their own security, too. The guys you’re talking about, they can go out, I can hire them very good security guards. They can hire their own security. They all made a lot of money. Fauci made a lot of money.”
Since Monday, Trump has complained about how President Joe Biden pardoned Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as one of his final acts before leaving office.
“Even if individuals have done nothing wrong — and in fact have done the right thing — and will ultimately be exonerated, the fact of being investigated or prosecuted can cause irreparable damage to reputations and finances,” Biden said in a statement at the time.
Fauci worked in government for decades and was the nation’s top infectious disease expert for 38 years. Trump awarded Fauci and 51 others who served on the Operation Warp Speed task force with presidential commendations during the COVID-19 pandemic, though Trump later claimed he did not know who gave them the commendations.
Fauci has been targeted by a number of right-wing figures.
After testifying during a contentious House hearing about the government’s response to the pandemic this summer, Fauci said he saw a direct correlation between a rise in death threats against him and his family and public figures linking him to COVID-19 conspiracy theories.
“It’s a pattern,” Fauci told Kaitlan Collins on “The Source” in June, that when someone in the media or Congress “gets up and makes a public statement that I’m responsible for the deaths of X number of people because of policies or some crazy idea that I created the virus — you can do it immediately, it’s like clockwork — the death threats go up substantially.”
