Friday, July 31, 2026
What to Know About Ceuta - The New York Times
What to Know About Ceuta
"The peninsula on Morocco’s northern coast that Spain has governed for centuries has been a frequent site of mass migrant crossings and political tensions.
Thousands of migrants in recent days have crossed onto a tiny peninsula on Morocco’s coast that Spain has governed for centuries, aggravating tensions over a border that has long troubled the relationship between the governments of Madrid and Rabat.
At least 18 people have died so far in their attempt to reach Spanish soil, a government spokesman for Spain said on Thursday.
The peninsula, Ceuta, is one of only two cities on the African mainland that are officially part of Europe. In search of better economic prospects, thousands of migrants have scaled a 20-foot-high border fence into Ceuta or entered the territory by sea in mass crossing episodes over the years.
Strait of Gibraltar
But so many migrants made the passage on Thursday that it prompted Spain to mobilize its military and ignited backlash from the country’s right-wing opposition, which accuses the government of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez of being lax on border control.
We covered the news here. Here’s a guide to why Ceuta matters.
Why is Ceuta a crossing hot spot?
A six-mile-long peninsula on Morocco’s northern coast, Ceuta is a Spanish exclave fortified by a double fence and a Spanish police and paramilitary presence.
The city, along with Melilla, another autonomous Spanish city further east along the same coast, have the European Union’s only land borders with Africa.
That means both cities are places where migrants seeking better livelihoods, many of them from Morocco, frequently attempt to cross into Europe.
More than 10,000 people came over the border into Ceuta over two days in 2021, for example. In 2022, at least 23 migrants died in a stampede during an attempted mass crossing in Melilla. Many others have died at sea.
To get in, some migrants swim around the fences. Others take short, illicit boat trips to Ceuta from Morocco. But mostly, they run and climb the fence, or use bolt-cutters to cut through it, and are often spotted by motion detectors and guards in observation towers in the process.
(Here’s a fascinating story about Ceuta’s soccer team, which unpacks the territory’s relationship with Spain.)
What happened there this week?
Some 1,500 migrants had already entered Ceuta in recent days. But on Thursday, Fernando Rodríguez Contreras, a Spanish government official, said that what may have been tens of thousands of people crossed over, a working estimate that could not be confirmed. At least 18 of them died in the attempt, a Spanish government spokesman said.
Spain’s government said in a statement that it was dispatching military platoons to enforce border security, increasing air and naval support and sending diving teams to patrol the waters. The European Union offered to send Spain support from Frontex, its border and Coast Guard agency, to reestablish order.
Why does this mass crossing matter?
The African mainland border has been a major source of domestic political tension for the left-wing government of Mr. Sánchez and a diplomatic pain point between Morocco and Spain.
Domestically, Mr. Sánchez has sought to project an image of Spain as the West’s new melting pot. He has embraced immigrants, especially Latin Americans, who speak Spanish.
But on Ceuta, Mr. Sánchez has drawn criticism from anti-immigrant and conservative political opponents, who accuse him of being lax on border control — as well as pro-immigrant advocates who criticize the government for harsh immigration enforcement tactics.
Right-wing critics seized on the moment Thursday, blaming Spain’s new plan to give undocumented migrants already in the country a path to legal status for attracting illegal arrivals.
“This is an invasion,” said Santiago Abascal, the leader of the far-right party Vox, who accused Mr. Sánchez’s government of purposefully inviting in the migrants, who he suggested, without evidence, were criminals, rapists and potential left-wing voters.
The government, however, made clear for its part that the high volume of illegal crossings was not part of its vision.
On the international front, Spain is eager to keep up good relations with Morocco, in part to maintain its cooperation in deterring migrant arrivals. After the major crossing episode in 2021, Spanish government officials said that Morocco saw the migrants as a kind of currency, leveraging control over their movement across the border to extract financial and political prizes from Spain.
Hours after the migrants began pouring into Ceuta that year, Spain approved 30 million euros, about $37 million, in aid to Morocco for border policing.
It was unclear on Thursday evening what had prompted the latest amassing of people in Ceuta. Analysts said it was too soon to draw conclusions but that Morocco may have been upset about Spain’s recent effort to deepen ties with Algeria."
Defying Trump, Cornyn Uses His Lame-Duck Power
Defying Trump, Cornyn Uses His Lame-Duck Power
“Senator John Cornyn, facing the end of his Senate career after losing to a Trump-backed challenger, is using his leverage to influence the nomination of Todd Blanche as attorney general. Cornyn, along with Senator Thom Tillis, is blocking Blanche’s nomination unless the Justice Department modifies an immunity settlement Trump reached with the IRS. This move, while modest, marks a shift for Cornyn, who has been a reliable Trump supporter, and highlights growing Republican frustration with the president.
In standing in the way of Todd Blanche, President Trump’s choice for attorney general, a liberated Senator John Cornyn is wielding his leverage.
Not long after Senator John Cornyn lost his re-election bid to a right-wing challenger backed by President Trump, the Texas Republican predicted that the remainder of his Senate tenure might be a “pretty bumpy ride” for the president. He warned that he and other lame-duck senators had “some cards to play” and would not hesitate to use them.
This week, depending on the metaphor you prefer, Mr. Cornyn either made himself a giant senatorial pothole or laid his hand on the table.
By wielding his vote on the Judiciary Committee as leverage, a newly liberated Mr. Cornyn threw Mr. Trump’s choice for attorney general, Todd Blanche, into limbo as the Senate left town for the weekend on Thursday night.
Both he and Senator Thom Tillis — the North Carolina Republican who chose not to seek re-election after Mr. Trump threatened to unseat him — said that they would not advance Mr. Blanche’s nomination unless the Justice Department agreed to narrow an immunity settlement that Mr. Trump reached with the I.R.S. to protect himself and his family.
The red line that Mr. Cornyn has drawn is fairly thin. He and Mr. Tillis are not seeking to kill the deal that Mr. Blanche negotiated with Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers, which gave the president, his family and his businesses broad immunity, potentially saving them at least $100 million in penalties and drawing accusations from Democrats of self-dealing. They are merely demanding modifications — in writing.
Still, his willingness to dig in his heels against a demand by Mr. Trump at a moment when the president’s popularity is sagging and senators are increasingly frustrated with him is notable.
Though Mr. Tillis has been more openly critical of Mr. Trump for months, Mr. Cornyn, a onetime contender for Senate majority leader, had long been a reliable Republican vote who rarely said a critical word about the president.
The senator, whose political future was cut short by Mr. Trump, has seemed to delight in the shift in power. Asked this week if the impending end of his political career had imbued him with a sense of independence, the senator flashed reporters crowded around him a playful smile.
“Have you noticed?” he said.
Yet as he finds himself emboldened, Mr. Cornyn has fashioned himself not as a scorned outcast seeking retribution but rather as a shield for other Republicans who share his concerns about the president’s settlement but fear the political consequences of airing them. In doing so, he has confirmed a truism of the Trump era: Republicans in Congress routinely swallow their distaste for and even outrage about the president’s actions, usually daring to act on them only once they are on their way out the door.
Mr. Cornyn made it explicit on Thursday morning, right after Mr. Trump suggested he might postpone Mr. Blanche’s nomination until the next Congress to get around the two G.O.P. objectors.
The president “is mistaken if he believes concerns about the provisions in his tax lawsuit settlement are limited to me and Senator Tillis,” Mr. Cornyn wrote on social media.
Some of his Republican colleagues backed him up — but none of those who are currently seeking re-election. Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska said that she “was actually hopeful” about Mr. Cornyn’s negotiations with Mr. Blanche because she had raised the same issues with him in a private meeting.
“I made it very clear where my concerns were,” Ms. Murkowski said. She said she had asked the nominee both about narrowing the I.R.S. settlement agreement and ensuring that a plan by the Justice Department to establish a $1.8 billion fund for people claiming to have been unfairly prosecuted by the government was “truly dead,” another concern Mr. Cornyn had raised.
Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who also lost his Republican primary to a Trump-backed challenger, said that he shared Mr. Cornyn’s desire to see limits on the I.R.S. settlement.
Senator John Curtis, Republican of Utah, met with Mr. Blanche on Wednesday and told The Deseret News, a Utah-based newspaper, that he supported Mr. Cornyn’s efforts.
Mr. Cornyn’s request is fairly modest. He wants the Justice Department to guarantee what Mr. Blanche said under oath at his confirmation hearing: that the I.R.S. immunity would apply only to Mr. Trump, two of his sons and the Trump Organization, and that it would be limited only to audits of past tax returns.
“All we’re doing is asking them to put that in writing,” Mr. Cornyn said.
That is a break from a now established pattern in which congressional Republicans critical of Mr. Trump’s policies offer broad and unspecific objections, only to back down after receiving equally broad assurances.
It was a strategy he had already deployed successfully. Earlier this month, Mr. Cornyn threatened to block two of Mr. Trump’s ambassadorial nominees if the administration continued withholding millions of dollars that Congress appropriated for H.I.V. prevention.
Mr. Cornyn’s clear parameters seemed to help him keep his colleagues’ measured support rather than drawing their scorn for sinking one of the president’s priorities.
“I certainly respect my colleague’s right to ask questions and to get items that were within his testimony clarified,” said Senator Mike Rounds, Republican of South Dakota.
And, he added, if Mr. Blanche “can’t get them clarified, then that suggests that maybe there’s a misunderstanding as to what he was testifying for in the first place.”
Carl Hulse and Olivia Diaz contributed reporting.
Michael Gold covers Congress for The Times, with a focus on immigration policy and congressional oversight.“
Thursday, July 30, 2026
Ex-White House counsel says Epstein accuser’s testimony ‘lacked inherent credibility’ | Jeffrey Epstein | The Guardian
Ex-White House counsel says Epstein accuser’s testimony ‘lacked inherent credibility’
"Kathryn Ruemmler was blasted by family of late Virginia Giuffre after House committee transcripts were released
A former White House counsel and former general counsel of Goldman Sachs, who has faced scrutiny over her past ties to Jeffrey Epstein, told a House committee this month that some of the allegations made by one his most prominent accusers “lacked inherent credibility”, according to newly released transcripts.
Kathryn Ruemmler’s name appeared thousands of times in records related to Epstein, the disgraced financier and convicted sex offender, that were released earlier this year by the US Department of Justice under the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
The files revealed Ruemmler had accepted gifts from Epstein, who died by suicide while awaiting trial in 2019 after he was arrested by federal authorities, at times addressed him as “Uncle Jeffrey” and “sweetie” in emails, and offered him informal advice on how to respond to questions about his sex crimes.
Ruemmler’s testimony before Congress when she was asked about Virginia Giuffre, a victim of Epstein’s abuse, was swiftly criticized by Giuffre’s family. “She should be ashamed of herself,” Giuffre’s brother and sister-in-law, Sky and Amanda Roberts, told CNN. Giuffre died by suicide in April 2025.
“Do you believe that Virginia Giuffre was a victim of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell?” the House oversight committee asked Ruemmler, who served as the White House counsel in the Obama administration, during her interview with the panel earlier this month part of its investigation into Epstein.
“I don’t know,” she responded, according to a transcript released on Wednesday.
Ruemmler went on to add: “If she says that she was, I don’t have a reason to doubt that. However, there were allegations that she made that were, I believed based on my experience as a former prosecutor and as a defense counsel, that were of such a nature that they were – they lacked inherent credibility.
“Typically, when someone says, I was sex trafficked to someone, they say who, when, where, not multiple world leaders, multiple foreign presidents,” she said.
Her remarks were condemned by Giuffre’s brother and sister-in-law, Sky and Amanda Roberts, who said in a statement to CNN that it as “reprehensible” to “attempt to cast doubt on Virginia, whose bravery was the reason so many other survivors stepped forward, resulting in more than 50 people having to step down from their positions of power”.
They said that “the only person who lacks credibility is Kathy Ruemmler”.
Giuffre, one of Epstein’s most prominent accusers, had previously testified and alleged that Epstein and Maxwell had abused her as a teenager, and trafficked her to powerful men, including Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, who has repeatedly denied the allegations against him.
Jennifer Connelly, a spokesperson for Ruemmler, said in a statement: “As Ms Ruemmler told the committee, she had no knowledge of any ongoing criminal activity by Epstein and there is not a shred of evidence to suggest otherwise.”
“Ms Ruemmler would never turn a blind eye to any criminal activity and if she had seen or heard anything to suggest that Epstein was harming women or girls, she would have taken action to stop it,” she added.
Another representative for Ruemmler also told CNN in a statement – before Giuffre’s family members had issued their statement – that Ruemmler “was responding to a specific discussion about specific allegations” and was “expressing skepticism regarding particular claims that had not been substantiated, not every allegation Ms Giuffre ever made”.
The transcript was released about two weeks after Ruemmler appeared before the committee. She was called to testify after the Epstein files revealed dozens of emails between her and Epstein between 2014 and 2019. At one point she had been listed as a backup executor of his will, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Ruemmler told lawmakers during the interview that they had a professional relationship and that Epstein had “used” her “to legitimize his standing” and that “it was a mistake to deal with” him.
She insisted that she never saw any “evidence of ongoing criminal conduct or misconduct of any kind by Epstein during the time I dealt with him” and also told lawmakers that “many” of her emails with Epstein had been “taken out of context or do not mean what some have speculated or suggested”.
Ruemmler announced in February that she would be resigning from her role at Goldman Sachs as chief legal officer."
Trump Live Updates: President Says He May Temporarily Drop Todd Blanche AG Nomination - The New York Times
Trump Administration Live Updates: President Says He May Drop Blanche Nomination, for Now
What We’re Covering
"Attorney General Vote: President Trump said on Thursday he may withdraw his nomination of Todd Blanche as attorney general, which was on hold after Republicans, lacking the necessary support, postponed a critical committee vote. Mr. Trump said he could nominate him again after two lame-duck Republican holdouts, who were concerned over a deal he cut to settle Mr. Trump’s lawsuit against the I.R.S., leave office next year. Read more ›
Immigration Enforcement: The Justice Department will seek on Thursday to use the sweeping powers of the Alien Terrorist Removal Court for the first time in its 30-year history, as it tries to deport an Afghan woman living in Texas who prosecutors say is a supporter of the terrorist group Islamic State, or ISIS."
Wednesday, July 29, 2026
A U.S. Citizen Deleted His Phone’s Data. Now He Faces a Felony Charge.
A U.S. Citizen Deleted His Phone’s Data. Now He Faces a Felony Charge.
“Samuel Tunick, a U.S. citizen, is facing a felony obstruction charge for using a duress passcode to erase his phone’s data during a customs search at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. The prosecution argues that the data on his phone was evidence subject to seizure, while his defense claims the search was unlawful and politically motivated. This case highlights the complexities of digital data privacy and the extent of government authority at border crossings.
Federal prosecutors charged a man returning to the United States with obstruction because he gave them a passcode that erased his smartphone during a customs search.
It sounds like something James Bond would use: a gadget that self-destructs if it falls into the wrong hands. But it’s actually an open-source operating system that can be downloaded onto Android phones.
Federal prosecutors in Atlanta are bringing an obstruction charge against a U.S. citizen who gave customs officers what is known as a duress passcode, which activated software that erased the contents of his phone.
The authorities stopped Samuel Tunick, an Atlanta resident, for interrogation at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport as he returned to the United States on Jan. 24 last year, according to a November grand jury indictment. The authorities seized his phone before allowing him to enter the country. A hearing on the case was held last week in federal court in Atlanta.
The prosecution is one of the earliest known instances of federal authorities charging a person with destroying evidence with a program designed to wipe a device when a specific code is entered.
Mr. Tunick’s lawyers argued during the hearing last week that the seizure was unlawful, and that he was targeted because of his political activism against Atlanta’s plan to build a police and fire training center within a 1,000-acre stretch of urban woodland. Opponents argue that the center, known as Cop City, would militarize officers and destroy precious green space.
The Statute Behind the Charge
The federal statute underlying the charge makes it a felony to destroy evidence or transfer assets to keep the government from seizing them, or to tip someone off about an upcoming search or wiretap. It carries a penalty of up to five years in federal prison, a fine, or both.
The act applies before, during or after a search. If the target of an investigation knows that a search or seizure is imminent, and that person acts to thwart it, he or she would fall under the statute, experts said.
The federal public defender’s office, which handles most cases in the Northern District of Georgia, said that only one other federal indictment had been filed on this charge in the last 30 years.
The 2019 case involved an accusation of destruction of evidence related to drug trafficking, said Matthew Dodge, a federal public defender who is on Mr. Tunick’s legal team.
Why Digital Data Can Be Seized
Courts have long treated digital data as property — think about intellectual property theft as one example — so a software wipe is treated in the legal system no differently than flushing physical evidence.
The government’s argument here is that the physical phone was just a container. The data itself was the property that they had lawful authority to seize, and inputting the duress code was the physical act that caused its destruction.
“The statute says explicitly it has to be for the purpose of preventing or impairing the government’s lawful authority,” said Daniel Richman, a law professor at Columbia University and a former prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office. “The key is he gave the code to the government, knowing that the entry of this code would erase the evidence.”
Does It Matter That It Was a Customs Search?
That it was a border search is central to both the government’s prosecution and the defense’s legal challenge.
Customs and border authorities believe that they have the right to search and seize incoming travelers’ digital devices without a search warrant or court order because travelers are not on U.S. soil until they’re authorized to enter.
Mr. Tunick, who was returning from a vacation in the Dominican Republic, and his lawyers argue that even at an international airport, travelers retain vital protections. They said that he was subjected to an unlawful detention, was never read his rights and was repeatedly denied requests to speak with a lawyer.
Federal courts, including the Supreme Court, have said that constitutional rights, like the Fourth Amendment, are diminished at the border because of the federal government’s increased interest in protecting our country, Mr. Dodge acknowledged.
How a Duress Passcode Works
A duress passcode is a privacy and security feature in which a user has previously configured a secondary passcode that is not their usual code to unlock the screen. If the user is forced or pressured to hand over their phone, they can provide this passcode instead of the one that unlocks their phone.
When the duress passcode is entered, rather than unlocking the phone, the operating system starts a full wipe of the device’s digital contents. The process leaves the physical device and hardware intact while completely erasing the underlying digital data.
In Mr. Tunick’s case, he used GrapheneOS, a private mobile operating system compatible with some Android phones.
No Details on the Original Investigation
“Many times the government wants to highlight what it was trying to investigate because that ups the stakes on what the defendant was doing,” Professor Richman said. “This is a case where I think they’re trying to avoid exactly that by focusing only on the destruction, and not what the investigation was about.”
The statute that is being used in this case has seldom been cited. It does not require the government to prove or explain the underlying investigation. A statute that is typically used carries a heavier maximum penalty of 20 years, but its use often forces the government to detail their underlying investigation.
“Whether they’ll succeed or not remains to be seen, if this goes to trial,” he said.
Timing Matters
Professor Richman suggested that travelers who decide to delete everything on their phone before going through an airport checkpoint simply because they did not want the government looking at their personal files have a strong argument that they did not act with the specific criminal intent to thwart an imminent search.
But there’s a turning point once you are stopped and are actively being questioned.
“Intentionally giving a wipe code to people you know to be exercising lawful authority,” he said, “is going to put you squarely in the realm of the statute.”
Kitty Bennett contributed research.
Adeel Hassan, a New York-based reporter for The Times, covers breaking news and other topics.“
Fauci Invokes the Fifth Amendment, Refusing to Answer Senate Committee Questions
Fauci Invokes the Fifth Amendment, Refusing to Answer Senate Committee Questions
“Dr. Anthony Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to testify before a Senate committee investigating the origins of Covid-19. The committee, chaired by Senator Rand Paul, is investigating whether the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which Fauci led, funded research in China that led to the pandemic. Fauci, who received a pre-emptive pardon from President Biden, denies the accusations and claims Paul’s inquiry is politically motivated.
The panel’s chairman, Rand Paul, has long accused Dr. Fauci of funding research that triggered the Covid pandemic and lying about it to Congress — charges Dr. Fauci denies.
Dr. Anthony S. Fauci refused on Wednesday to answer questions from a Senate committee investigating the origins of Covid-19, accusing the panel’s chairman of having an “unhinged obsession with me” before invoking his constitutional right under the Fifth Amendment not to incriminate himself.
“On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution,” Dr. Fauci said repeatedly, as Republican members of the Senate Homeland Security Committee questioned him.
Senator Rand Paul, the panel’s chairman, pointedly warned the scientist that there would “be repercussions” for his refusal to answer questions. When a lawyer for Dr. Fauci, David Schertler, piped up to defend him, Mr. Paul ordered security to escort Mr. Schertler from the room. “He was not invited to testify,” the senator later said.
The decision not to testify marked the latest turn in the long-running battle between Dr. Fauci, who spent nearly four decades as the government’s top infectious disease expert, and Senator Paul, who accuses Dr. Fauci of funding research in China that sparked the pandemic, and then lying about it to Congress — accusations Dr. Fauci vehemently denies.
“Frankly the American people deserve an apology,” Mr. Paul said in his opening statement. “I hope today Dr. Fauci will come clean, admit it was a mistake to fund dangerous research in China.” He accused Dr. Fauci of saying “one thing in public, and another in private” — an apparent reference to diary entries written by Dr. Fauci and released by Mr. Paul over the weekend.
In a brief opening statement, Dr. Fauci noted that he had testified before Congress more than 200 times during the 38 years he ran the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, including during the Covid pandemic.
“Over that period, I proved that I believe in and respect the value of legitimate congressional oversight,” he said.
“However,” Dr. Fauci added, “given Senator Paul’s obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution, his repeated slanderous comments about me, and recently his publicly releasing my unredacted personal diary aimed at embarrassing and intimidating me, the only conclusion I can reach is that the sole reason he is calling me before this committee is to get me to say something that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, ‘behind bars.’”
Dr. Fauci received a pre-emptive pardon from former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., but the pardon protects him only from federal prosecution for actions he took through the date it was issued, Jan. 19, 2025. He told the panel that it pained him not to answer questions, but that he was doing so on the advice of his lawyers.
At the center of Mr. Paul’s inquiry is whether the coronavirus originated naturally, as Dr. Fauci believes, or in a laboratory. Mr. Paul insists that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which Dr. Fauci ran from 1984 until his retirement at the end of 2022, funded dangerous research in China that spun out of control and essentially created the virus that led to the pandemic. Dr. Fauci says that is not true.
That research, called “gain-of-function,” involves tinkering with the genetic makeup of viruses so that scientists can better understand how they evolve and use that information to prevent future pandemics. On Tuesday, President Trump announced fresh restrictions on such work.
While Dr. Fauci’s institute did fund research at the Wuhan laboratory in China, the National Institutes of Health has repeatedly said the viruses being studied with American tax dollars were distinct from the one that caused Covid-19. But Mr. Paul asserted that Dr. Fauci had stuck to a narrow definition of gain-of-function research that did not capture the risks of work his institute had funded in Wuhan.
“The American people weren’t asking for a semantics debate over what is gain of function,” the senator said. “They were asking for common sense over whether this research was dangerous in Wuhan.”
The top Democrat on the panel, Senator Gary Peters of Michigan, accused Mr. Paul of waging a politically-motivated inquiry to “basically legitimize a predetermined conclusion that was reached years ago.”
Dr. Fauci and Mr. Paul have been tangling for years. In 2021, when the senator accused Dr. Fauci of lying while testifying before the Senate, Dr. Fauci replied, “If anybody is lying here, senator, it is you.”
Mr. Schertler, Mr. Fauci’s lawyer, said in a statement that he believes that exchange “triggered” the senator’s crusade against his client. But he did not deliver the statement, because Mr. Paul refused to let him speak. Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, read parts of the statement into the record.
“The accusations that Chairman Paul continues to propagate are false and disgraceful,” the statement said, “and we will examine all options to hold him accountable.”
Over the weekend, Mr. Paul released more than 1,100 pages of Dr. Fauci’s typewritten diary without saying how he got them. On Tuesday, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he gave the documents to Mr. Paul and another Republican, Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, “so they could see the light of day.”
The diary does not add much to the scientific debate around the so-called lab leak theory. Rather, it echoes past disclosures showing Dr. Fauci wrestling with a fast-moving crisis as scientific understanding of the virus evolved.
But the entries included personal observations in which Dr. Fauci marveled at his fame and his relationships with a rapidly growing list of celebrities, further inflaming a partisan political battle.
Mr. Paul has been taunting Dr. Fauci on Twitter all week, and Dr. Fauci’s conservative critics have been ridiculing him over diary entries that focus on his own fame and his relationships with celebrities.
Peter Staley, a longtime AIDS activist and close friend of Dr. Fauci’s, said he kept the diary to help write a memoir, which he was already drafting when the pandemic hit. It was published in 2024. Mr. Staley said the personal observations reflect Dr. Fauci being “astonished at what was happening in his life.”
On Tuesday, a group of more than 155 physicians, scientists and public health advocates, organized by AIDS activists who worked closely with Dr. Fauci in the 1990s, issued a public letter defending him and condemning what they considered the Trump administration’s relentless attacks on science and scientists.
Sheryl Gay Stolberg is a correspondent based in Washington for The Times, covering Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and President Trump’s health agenda.“
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