Vic Fangio walked into his first media session of Philadelphia Eagles training camp with a plan.

It lasted about five seconds.

Before taking a single football question, the Eagles defensive coordinator reached straight into Wednesday’s Anthony Fauci spectacle on Capitol Hill and delivered a one-liner that had reporters cracking up.

“I’m gonna be like Fauci and just take the Fifth Amendment on all questions,” Fangio said.

“Did you guys see that? Oh my God.”

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Watch the moment here:

That is an NFL coach who knew exactly what story had swallowed the news cycle.

Fangio did not turn the press conference into a political speech. He made the joke, enjoyed the reaction, and moved on to football.

But the line landed because it came less than 24 hours after Fauci spent a remarkable morning refusing to answer senators’ questions.

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee confirms that Fauci appeared as the sole witness at its July 29 hearing. The former NIAID director had been subpoenaed to testify as lawmakers revisited the federal response to COVID-19, pandemic-era research funding, and questions surrounding the virus’s origins.

Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination at the beginning of the hearing and then continued using it as senators pressed him.

The committee page carries the official hearing video, making the scale of the standoff plain. What was expected to be a major round of testimony instead became hours of questions followed by the same refusal.

That is the image Fangio captured in one sentence: ask the question, get the Fifth.

The hearing’s central frustration was impossible to miss:

An Axios recap of the hearing reported that Fauci invoked the Fifth more than 50 times. The questions drew heavily on more than 1,000 pages from Fauci’s personal diary that Paul had released ahead of the hearing.

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Fauci said he believed Paul’s pursuit of prosecution created a real risk that anything he said could be used to launch a new investigation. He accused the senator of an “unhinged obsession” with putting him behind bars and said he was following his lawyers’ advice.

Paul argued that Fauci’s broad pardon from former President Joe Biden undercut that claim. He announced that the committee would vote the following week on a contempt resolution after Fauci continued refusing to answer.

Invoking the Fifth Amendment is a constitutional right. It is not, by itself, proof that a witness committed a crime.

It can still be a stunning thing to watch when the witness is a former senior government official, the questions concern decisions that affected the entire country, and Congress is told it will receive no answers.

Apparently, the moment was so unforgettable that it traveled from a Senate hearing room to an NFL training camp press conference overnight.

Fangio’s defense will spend the next several weeks trying to keep opponents from getting answers, too.

He just found a very different way to explain the strategy.

This is a Guest Post from our friends over at WLTReport. View the original article here.

 

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