Anthony Fauci sat before the U.S. Senate and pleaded the Fifth 111 times.
Now even the Left's most reliable late-night voice has turned on him.
What Bill Maher said is something Democrats never wanted to admit out loud.
Bill Maher Torches Fauci on Real Time After COVID Senate Hearing
On Real Time, Bill Maher said what his fellow liberals in media have refused to admit for five years.
"He was caught in actual lies," Maher said of Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Fauci had just finished a three-hour Senate hearing where he invoked his Fifth Amendment right 111 times – refusing to answer a single question from Sen. Rand Paul's committee about gain-of-function research, COVID origins, and his handling of the pandemic.
Maher didn't buy the performance.
"He was telling people up front when it first began [that] it was from the wet markets," Maher said. "It could not – that's a conspiracy theory – if you say it escaped from the lab."
Maher wasn't done.
"And he knew better," the comedian said. "Because we have him in his diary telling us what he was saying to other scientists, who were saying, 'No, absolutely.'"
Fauci Diary Exposes Private Lab Leak Doubts He Hid From Congress
Paul had dropped 1,141 pages of Fauci's private diary entries four days before the hearing – and Maher had clearly read them.
Those entries are devastating.
On January 26, 2020 – before most Americans had ever heard the phrase "lab leak" – Fauci wrote privately that "the wet market was not the source, it was the amplifier."
Five days later, on January 31, top virologists flagged something alarming: the virus's furin cleavage site – a feature that affects transmissibility – did not look natural.
About half the scientists on that call concluded the virus had been engineered.
Fauci spent the next two years publicly dismissing the lab leak theory as a dangerous fringe conspiracy.
He told Congress under oath that no gain-of-function research had been funded through the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
The diary tells a different story – recording his private frustration over NIH money sent through EcoHealth Alliance to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for exactly that kind of work.
Paul released the diaries with one finding: "What he wrote privately and what he told the country are two different stories."
At the hearing, Paul had Fauci's attorney physically removed by Capitol Police after the lawyer tried repeatedly to interject at the witness table – a moment that drew gasps from the packed hearing room.
Paul has now threatened a contempt vote against Fauci for his refusal to answer.
Maher Says COVID Lab Leak Was Suppressed as Racist to Protect Gain of Function Research
Maher argued the suppression of the lab leak theory had nothing to do with science.
It was about race.
"You couldn't say it escaped from the lab, because that was the racist point of view somehow – that the entire Asian continent would have been somehow complicit in this because it escaped from the [lab]," Maher said. "It was ridiculous."
"We make everything about race," he said. "And this is one of the repercussions in this."
Curtis Houck, managing editor of NewsBusters at the Media Research Center, told Fox News Digital that Maher was doing what the mainstream press refused to do.
"The media have made the decision to be joined at the hip with Fauci, even as his credibility has dropped off a cliff," Houck said.
Maher defended the lab leak theory publicly in January 2026 when the mainstream press was still calling it a Trump talking point.
Fauci's own diary has now confirmed everything Maher suspected.
Seven million people died.
Fauci's lockdowns destroyed families.
An entire generation of children lost years of their lives – locked out of classrooms, masked at desks, cut off from grandparents – while the man in charge privately recorded doubts he never once shared with the American public.
Fauci won't answer questions about any of it.
Bill Maher is a lifelong liberal who has never been mistaken for a Trump voter.
When even he cannot defend Anthony Fauci anymore, the cover-up is over.
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