Kayleigh McEnany stood at the White House podium in July 2020 and made the case to reopen schools.
Now Fauci's private pandemic diary is public, and McEnany has been reading every page.
What she found written about that briefing day is something Fauci just refused to explain under oath.
Fauci Diary Entries Reveal a Different Story on COVID School Closures
On July 9, 2020, the White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany cited four separate health authorities from the White House briefing room, and every one of them pointed the same direction.
One in five child abuse cases in America was caught through schools — close them, and those cases disappear. McKinsey had already run the numbers: minority students would be hit hardest by closures. The CDC director's own assessment was that children were minimally at risk from the virus itself.
Fauci's diary told a different story.
"Bob Redfield, the CDC director, was defending the school CDC guidance of opening schools. Clearly, President Trump does not care about the safety of the children," Fauci wrote.
He didn't call the science unclear or the evidence mixed. He wrote that Trump didn't care about children – at the exact moment Trump's administration was citing child welfare data to reopen schools.
Writing that a president doesn't care about children's safety – in private, while his team was citing child welfare data in public – is a political attack, not a scientific disagreement.
Fauci spent years insisting he had nothing to do with any of it. \
"Show me a school that I shut down," he told reporters in 2023. "Never. I never did." His March 2020 diary entry says otherwise — Fauci wrote that he "convinced" New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio to close the city's schools, and that California Governor Gavin Newsom had made the same call "based on my TV appearances."
The Fauci Contradiction His Own Diary Hid for Six Years
The timeline is damning.
Two months before his attack on the school reopening push, Fauci had written in that same diary that children were missing measles vaccinations and that the country risked more excess deaths from measles than from COVID.
He said it himself. Kids being kept home was dangerous.
Then, two months later, he was writing that Trump didn't care about children's safety for trying to do exactly what Fauci's own reasoning demanded.
McEnany, who served as White House press secretary during Trump's first term, said it on The Five: "I was in the Situation Room with Dr. Fauci, I was in the Oval Office with Dr. Fauci, I had phone calls with Dr. Fauci. I spent a lot of time with this man. And I'm very frustrated because the American people deserve answers."
She's earned the right to that frustration.
COVID Lockdowns and the Learning Loss Fauci Refused to Answer For
The lockdowns happened, the schools closed, and the consequences were real.
American children lost a year or more of learning they will never get back. When House investigators asked him about it in 2024, Fauci said he was "not convinced" kids had suffered any learning loss at all.
Small businesses were wiped out in weeks, and child abuse cases that would have been flagged by school staff went unreported entirely.
Now, on top of all of this, comes Fauci's diary – 1,141 pages, located by RFK Jr. on 11 government servers where they had been, in Kennedy's words, "sequestered and secreted."
Fauci was then subpoenaed to explain himself before Rand Paul's Senate Homeland Security Committee. His answer: the Fifth Amendment – more than 100 times.
A man who spent two decades as America's most powerful public health voice, who appeared on every television network in the country, who lectured the public about following the science – refused to answer a single question under oath.
McEnany called it "indeed a crime" that Americans still don't have answers. She's right – and Fauci's own diary is now the evidence.
Sources:
- Matt Margolis, "Kayleigh McEnany's Inside Story With Fauci Will Leave You Furious," PJ Media, August 7, 2026.
- Jonathan Turley, "Fauci's Fifth Amendment Silence Betrays the Science He Sold America," Fox News, July 29, 2026.
- Susan Ferrechio, "The Fauci Diaries: Top Five Takeaways," The Washington Times, July 29, 2026.
- "Fauci's Diary Entries Claim Credit for Lockdowns Despite Public Denials," Fox News, July 2026.
- Rand Paul, "Will the Real Anthony Fauci Please Stand Up?" Daily Wire, August 3, 2026.