Fauci diary entries show he recruited Obama and a Washington Post reporter to fight 'Beaglegate' fallout

Newly released diary entries from Dr. Anthony Fauci reveal he coordinated with former President Barack Obama and a Washington Post journalist to manage the political damage from allegations his agency funded painful experiments on beagle puppies, a behind-the-scenes campaign that raises fresh questions about how Washington's most powerful figures protect their own.

The entries, dated October and November 2021, describe phone calls, emails, and a media strategy that Fauci orchestrated as the scandal known as "Beaglegate" gained traction on Capitol Hill and in conservative media. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) released the records, which Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said were retrieved from 11 separate government servers. The New York Post first reported on the diary contents and the coordination they describe.

The underlying scandal is straightforward and bipartisan in its outrage. Between 2019 and 2020, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which Fauci directed, approved a $375,000 grant that funded experiments in which the snouts of sedated dogs were forced into mesh pouches so sand flies, starved for 24 hours, could feed on them. The dogs were later euthanized. When the grant came to light in late 2021, Republican and Democratic members of Congress issued a joint letter of condemnation.

Fauci's diary: 'A concerted effort to discredit me'

Fauci's own words, written in real time, show a man less concerned with the substance of the allegations than with managing the political fallout. In an October 26, 2021 entry, he framed the controversy entirely as an attack on his reputation:

"It is so very clear now that this is a concerted effort to discredit me and assassinate my character. We have counted the attacks regarding the Beagle dog experiments, but still the attacks continue falsely claiming that NIAID funded the studies."

That last phrase is worth pausing on. Fauci wrote in his private diary that critics were "falsely claiming" NIAID funded the studies. But by June 2024, testifying under oath before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, Fauci acknowledged that he had, in fact, signed off on the grants. His explanation: "I signed off on them because they were approved by a peer review."

An early October 2021 diary entry offers a possible explanation for the contradiction. Fauci wrote: "I have no idea what the grant is nor what they are doing in the grants and I'm asking the staff to investigate." Whether that ignorance excuses the public denials that followed is a question the diary entries do not answer, but they do confirm that Fauci moved quickly from claiming ignorance to dismissing the accusations as lies, all within the span of a few weeks.

A Washington Post reporter became part of the strategy

The diary entries describe a relationship with Washington Post journalist Yasmeen Abutaleb that went well beyond standard reporter-source interaction. Fauci referenced Abutaleb more than two dozen times in the newly released entries and described her as one of his "media friends."

On October 27, 2021, Fauci wrote that Abutaleb "has agreed to write a story trying to uncover the source of this organized effort to discredit me." He added: "Up to this point I have told her to hold back on doing any big story." That phrasing, "I have told her to hold back", suggests Fauci saw himself as directing the timing and scope of the Post's coverage, not simply responding to a reporter's questions.

The next day's entry went further. Fauci wrote that Abutaleb was "getting very worked up" and wanted to use "the investigative reporter capabilities of the Washington Post to try and find out if they can track funding for this effort to the Republican Party or to any other organization that is trying to discredit me." Fauci's summary: "Let us see how this turns out."

One day later, Fauci emailed Abutaleb with a telling instruction: "I will send you an e-mail via my gmail account." Fauci's attorney, David Schertler, has previously said that email "involved a personal matter and not a matter related to government business." But the diary entries themselves describe the relationship in explicitly professional and strategic terms, Fauci was coordinating media coverage of a government scandal with a reporter he considered a friend, and then moving that communication to a personal email account.

That pattern echoes broader concerns about Fauci's use of private channels to conduct what was, by any reasonable reading, government-related business. It also mirrors the conduct of David Morens, Fauci's former senior adviser at NIAID, who was indicted earlier this year for concealing and destroying federal records by evading Freedom of Information Act requests and using private email to communicate with grantees.

Abutaleb, who now works for Reuters, did not respond to the Post's requests for comment. She published an article in the Washington Post in November 2021 that Fauci later described in his diary as a "fantastic article" about "the false claims against me by the right wing motivated White Coat Waste project regarding the Beagle experiments."

Obama called to offer the White House's help

The diary entries also describe direct intervention from former President Barack Obama. In early November 2021, Fauci wrote that Obama called him, "expressed concern," and offered to "call up" then-President Biden's chief of staff Ron Klain or other officials "to have the administration be proactive in countering these lies."

A November 4, 2021 entry records Obama's language in blunter terms. Fauci wrote that Obama called Donald Trump Jr. "a f***ing moron" and "apologized for using crude language but then went on to say that Donald Trump was a hopeless idiot who was a pathologic liar." These are Fauci's written accounts of Obama's words, not direct statements from Obama. Representatives for the former president did not respond to the Post's requests for comment.

Six days after that November 4 entry, Fauci wrote that he fielded a call from a senior adviser to Obama about a PR strategy for handling the Beaglegate accusations. The identity of that adviser is not disclosed in the diary entries.

The picture that emerges is one of coordinated damage control spanning the Democratic establishment, a former president, a sitting White House chief of staff's office, and a major newspaper's investigative team, all enlisted in service of one bureaucrat's reputation. The pattern of concealment and institutional loyalty within the Biden-Obama orbit has surfaced in other contexts as well, but rarely with this level of documentary specificity.

White Coat Waste says the diary proves a 'covert damage-control campaign'

The White Coat Waste Project, the bipartisan watchdog group founded by a Republican strategist that first exposed the beagle experiments, responded directly to the diary revelations. Justin Goodman, the group's senior vice president, issued a pointed statement:

"From the moment we exposed Beaglegate, the Washington establishment, bureaucrats, politicians and the corporate media, circled the wagons to defend Fauci over his funding of deadly dog labs. Now, Fauci's own diary reveals that former President Barack Obama personally helped him coordinate a covert damage-control campaign to discredit White Coat Waste after we ignited what The Washington Post called 'the biggest firestorm yet for Fauci.'"

The group had previously accused Fauci of lying in House testimony about his use of personal email. The Morens indictment, for destroying records and evading FOIA, adds institutional weight to those accusations, even though no charges against Fauci himself have been reported.

From 'I have no idea' to 'I signed off on them'

The timeline the diary entries establish is damaging in its own right, independent of the media coordination. In early October 2021, Fauci claimed in his diary that he had "no idea" what the beagle grant involved. By October 26, he was calling the allegations a "concerted effort" based on false claims. By October 27, he had a Washington Post reporter lined up to investigate his critics. By early November, a former president was offering to mobilize the White House on his behalf.

And by June 2024, under oath, Fauci admitted he had signed off on the grants all along.

The gap between those positions, between private ignorance, public denial, coordinated media defense, and eventual sworn admission, is the core of the story. Fauci's diary does not read like the journal of a man wrongly accused. It reads like the playbook of a Washington operator who understood that the right phone calls and the right reporter could make a scandal manageable, at least for a while.

The dogs in those experiments did not have media friends or a former president's phone number. They had mesh pouches strapped to their faces and a needle at the end of the study. The people who funded that work owed the public a straight answer, not a PR campaign.