Former President Biden's late Christmas presents to his family and favorite allies – preemptive pardons for crimes they may have committed, some even predating President Trump's first term – may come to look more like Human Fund donations than tokens of lasting value.

Critics of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for nearly four decades and COVID-19 adviser to the Biden and the first Trump White House, predicted Monday his pardon would not only cement him as a criminal in the public's eyes but more broadly harm the Democratic ex-president's legacy.

Ten days after Biden's unprecedented pardon of son Hunter based on allegedly unfair and selective prosecution, which Trump took as carte blanche to pardon "the J-6 Hostages," Biden's Justice Department told a court considering whether to delay a Capitol rioter's judgment until Trump takes office that accepting a pardon "necessitates a confession of guilt."

Biden's Monday pardon statement, however, says his "issuance of these pardons should not be mistaken as an acknowledgment that any individual engaged in any wrongdoing, nor should acceptance be misconstrued as an admission of guilt for any offense."

Echoing his son's pardon, Biden justified the preemptive exonerations for "dedicated, selfless public servants" as saving them from becoming "targets of unjustified and politically motivated prosecutions," saying America is "safer and healthier because of" Fauci.

Georgia-based COVID analyst Kelly Krohnert, who documented dozens of basic data errors on COVID by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, called out the incongruence between Biden and his department Monday. 

Lawyer Laura Powell, who secured a preliminary injunction against California's medical misinformation law that convinced the state to abandon it, said DOJ was wrong. She cited a 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in 2021 that denied pardon acceptance had the "legal effect of a confession of guilt," based on a 110-year-old Supreme Court precedent. 

"I appreciate the president reaching out and trying to protect me from baseless accusations," Fauci told Reuters, emphasizing he didn't ask for a pardon. "I've done nothing wrong and this is no admission of any guilt."

Biden issued seven "warrants" on his final full day in office with varying conditions, with Jan. 6 committee members pardoned for "any offenses" related to the committee's "activities or subject matter" and pardons for Fauci and Biden's brothers, sister and in-laws each backdated to Jan. 1, 2014. 

Fauci's covers "any" offenses related to his service as NIAID director, member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force and White House COVID-19 Response Team and chief medical adviser to the president, while the Biden family's is limited to "nonviolent" offenses.

"Notably 2014 was the year that the [National Institutes of Health] had a 3 year pause on gain of function research," which enhances viral capabilities, and Fauci allegedly violated it by funding the EcoHealth Alliance to "outsource GOF research" to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, University of California San Francisco epidemiologist Vinay Prasad wrote Monday.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., referred Fauci to the Justice Department for prosecution in summer 2023 and called for his firing, saying a Fauci email from February 2020 "directly contradicts everything he said in committee hearing to me, denying absolutely that they funded any gain-of-function," which may have created SARS-CoV-2 and the subsequent pandemic.

Last spring Paul said he had a "smoking gun" from a "brave Marine" whistleblower tying Fauci and NIAID to a 2018 grant proposal that sought to experiment in China with a COVID-19-type microbe. A top NIH official belatedly agreed it funded GoF research under its own "generic" definition, since scrubbed, but not the regulatory definition used to approve grants.

The pardon's 10-year scope "can be considered strong evidence that the Biden administration knows he is responsible for the COVID19 pandemic," Prasad wrote. If Paul, the new chair of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, can retrieve Fauci's personal Gmail messages, through which his adviser David Morens said they often communicated, "the true picture will be known."

Observers suggested the GOP-controlled Congress simply call Fauci back to catch him in another alleged lie. 

"His ego will not allow him to admit to his mistakes and crimes," retired career Army physician and medical oncologist David McCune said.

"If he answers no" to funding GoF, "then he will again be liable for perjury," Prasad wrote. "If he instead answers yes, it will be a damning inditement [sic] of his legacy." 

McCune opposed Fauci's pardon when it was floated because "Americans deserve a full accounting" of the "COVID disaster" and he feared the precedent. 

"Does America really want, say, a Kash Patel witch-hunting through the FBI, knowing that after four years he’s guaranteed total immunity for anything he does?" McCune wrote of the FBI nominee.

Fauci's pardon closely followed the Department of Health and Human Services formally debarring EcoHealth and former president Peter Daszak on Friday from federal funding, for a period of five years, "to protect the Federal Government’s business interests."

Each challenged, as recently as Jan. 15, the proposed cutoffs from last spring based on NIH's "undisputed" conclusion that "WIV research likely violated protocols of the NIH regarding biosafety," a failure by EcoHealth and Daszak "so serious or compelling … that it affects your present responsibility" – language repeated in the Friday letters to each.

"Turns out the Covid vaccines provide immunity after all," former New York Times drug industry reporter Alex Berenson deadpanned Monday on Fauci's pardon, saying his lawsuit against the feds for jawboning social media to censor him was now "the only legal effort to hold anyone accountable for the censorship and lies around the Covid jabs with a chance to go anywhere."

Though Fauci is not a defendant, he "talked regularly" in 2021 with defendant Andy Slavitt, the former senior adviser to the COVID-19 response coordinator "at the core of the conspiracy to censor me" for challenging the efficacy of COVID vaccines, and "both were desperate to get mRNA jabs in the arms of as many Americans as they could," Berenson said.

He's seeking to amend his First Amendment lawsuit with new evidence from Mark Zuckerberg's recent interview with Joe Rogan. 

The Meta CEO said the Biden administration "violated the law" by trying to "suppress true things" around COVID vaccines and multiple agencies started "coming after our company" after Biden claimed that Facebook was "killing people." Slavitt and White House official Rob Flaherty were "personally involved" in that pressure, Berenson said.

Slavitt opposed Berenson's "letter-motion" last week, calling it a prohibited "surreply" because his earlier motion to amend is "fully briefed" and that Berenson just wants to "add unspecified allegations from a multi-hour podcast." It's not even relevant to his claims, which are "based on his suspension from Twitter," and Berenson doesn't even say he had a Facebook account.