# Bernie Moreno — "Who the f--- do you think you were?" > [!quote] "Here I am sitting in front of you six years later saying, 'Who the f--- do you think you were for doing that?' It is a total disgrace what you did to this country." > — Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH), to Anthony Fauci, Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing, July 29, 2026 ## Context Delivered during the [[Fauci Diary Hearing]], the July 29, 2026 session at which [[Anthony Fauci]] — subpoenaed by committee chair [[Rand Paul]] — invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times over roughly three hours. Moreno was not questioning a witness who was answering. He was shouting at one who had already stated he would not answer, on the advice of counsel, because of the perjury exposure left open by the limits of [[Joe Biden]]'s preemptive pardon. Moreno has said Fauci's influence over COVID-19 policy — Ohio's mask mandates in particular — is what motivated him to run for the Senate in the first place. The exchange, rather than any substantive testimony, became the clip that circulated from the hearing. ## Why This Matters The remark is a compact illustration of what the hearing was structurally for. The committee had already published the 1,100-page diary a week earlier; it possessed the documents, and the witness had announced he would not speak. What remained available was affect, and affect is what the format produced. It also captures the tense on which the grievance runs. "Who the f--- do you think you *were*" is a question about authority — not about whether Fauci's guidance was wrong, but about who authorized him to issue it. That is the durable core of the pandemic backlash documented in [[COVID Lab Leak Weaponization]]: the objection is less to the content of public-health advice than to the existence of an unelected official whose advice carried force. There is a second reading worth recording. On the same day Moreno shouted this at a retired civil servant, he was publicly silent about [[Max Miller]] — his own daughter's ex-husband, then facing a detailed *Mother Jones* accounting of allegations that he had held a gun to her head and injured their two-year-old. Moreno reversed within about a week and became the first Republican to call for Miller's resignation, but the July 29 juxtaposition of volumes is what [[Heather Cox Richardson]]'s letter recorded. ## Verification - **Provenance:** Reported July 29, 2026 by [The Hill](https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5996729-moreno-expletive-fauci-hearing-covid/), [CNN](https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/29/politics/video/senator-moreno-fauci-fbomb-hearing-digvid-vrtc), NBC4 Columbus, Spectrum News, and the Daily Caller; video exists. - **Status:** Verbatim and undisputed. Outlets censored the profanity variously as "f---" or "f\*ck"; The Hill's rendering is used above. ## Related quotes - [[Anthony Fauci - unhinged obsession]] — the witness's own characterization of the proceeding - [[Anthony Fauci - molecularly impossible]] — the diary entry the hearing was ostensibly about ## See Also - [[Fauci Diary Hearing]] - [[Bernie Moreno]] - [[Max Miller]]