Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kansas, pressed Dr. Anthony Fauci to reveal his finances in a congressional hearing Tuesday, saying that his staff couldn’t find any public financial disclosure from the nation’s most famous pandemic official.
But we did.
As part of my job as an investigative reporter at the Center for Public Integrity, in 2020 I requested Fauci’s most recent disclosure at the time. It covers calendar year 2019, and you can see it here.
As a senior government official, Fauci must disclose his income, stock holdings, gifts and other items annually, thanks to the Ethics in Government Act of 1978. Like other career officials’ disclosures, Fauci’s are not posted online, but they are public record. Anyone can obtain the documents by requesting them from the National Institutes of Health, which oversees the agency Fauci leads.
Marshall, seemingly unaware of this, suggested “the big tech giants” were keeping the doctor’s disclosure secret. “You’re so misinformed; it’s extraordinary,” Fauci told him. “My financial disclosure is public knowledge and has been so for the last 37 years or so… It’s totally accessible for you if you want it.” He was later heard to call the senator a “moron.”
Marshall himself was more than 17 months late to file required stock disclosures, a Business Insider investigation found.
Marshall’s office said in a statement that the disclosure I posted had “extensive redactions,” that they still did not consider it “publicly available” since it must be requested and that they still wanted to see a disclosure covering 2020. A spokesperson for Fauci said he was not available for comment.
It’s unclear why the NIH processed the 2019 disclosure using the Freedom of Information Act, leading to the redactions. The agency did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Yesterday I requested Fauci’s 2020 disclosure, which should be filed by now. When I get it, I’ll post it. But it may take a while: Last time it took the NIH about two and a half months to fulfill my request — not an uncommon turnaround time for a federal agency.