First, h/t to Jeffrey Tucker for inspiration on that title!
Let’s get the disclosure out of the way first, because it isn’t a disclosure so much as the reason this newsletter exists.
The origins of Rational Ground are tied directly to Dr. Scott Atlas’s efforts at the White House. We formed a pro bono data team and for roughly six months provided nearly daily support to Dr. Atlas, helping him right the ship. We were proud of that work then and we’re proud to say so now.
So read what follows knowing exactly where we sit. Then read the emails, which say what they say regardless.
The document set
On August 3, 2026, the Independent Institute’s Phillip W. Magness obtained and released NIH FOIA case 57534 — seven volumes, 7,386 pages of Anthony Fauci’s NIH email.
The important thing about this release isn’t the page count. It’s what isn’t blacked out.
Across all 7,386 pages there are zero (b)(5) withholdings — the deliberative-process exemption, the one agencies use to hide internal discussion. The 2021 Leopold release had 414 of them. What remains here is routine privacy redaction.
For the first time, the internal conversation is legible.
August: the part that cuts against us
We’re going to start with the material that complicates our own story, because a piece that skips it isn’t worth reading.
In late August 2020, Fauci’s engagement with Atlas’s scientific argument was real. Atlas had advanced the position that cross-reactive T-cell immunity from prior common-cold coronavirus exposure meant the herd immunity threshold was far lower than assumed. Fauci didn’t wave it away. He went and asked.
On August 25 he wrote to Deborah Birx summarizing what Shane Crotty and Alex Sette — two genuinely first-rate immunologists at Scripps — had to say about it, and NIAID began scoping actual studies to test the question, including expanded longitudinal cohorts.
In the same period he wrote something that, read in 2026, is almost poignant:
“As I mentioned to you last week, we should sit down with Scott and explicitly spell out our differences since they will become public very soon. We have to be able to say that we gave him the courtesy to know that we disagree.“
That is a man behaving properly.
The same email contains the other August tell. Learning that the White House was bringing in outside physicians, Fauci wrote to Birx:
“The White House is sending a strong signal by having Scott Atlas, along with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, Dr. Martin Kulldorff, and Dr. Cody Meissner up there. As Butch Cassidy said to the Sundance Kid — ‘Who are those guys?’ They are stacking the deck against you.”
Readers of this newsletter will recognize most of those names. In August 2020 they were, to the man running the response, an unfamiliar threat.
October 6: the removal demand
Six weeks later the courtesy is gone.
A Business Insider reporter emailed Fauci for comment on an interview she’d conducted with Atlas. Fauci forwarded it to Marc Short, the Vice President’s chief of staff, under the subject line “PLEASE READ!”
“I am not planning to respond publicly since that would be beneath my dignity. However, a line has been crossed here am [sic] I strongly suggest that Dr. Atlas be removed from the Task Force and quite frankly from the White House itself.“
Then, after disputing Atlas’s characterizations of him, comes the part that deserves to be read twice:
“what he has been preaching about public health measures has put the POTUS and the White House staff at risk, resulting in the infection of our President and several White House staff and other government officials. As I mentioned, I am not going to address this publicly, but it must be addressed internally.”
Fauci told the Vice President’s chief of staff that Scott Atlas was responsible for infecting the President of the United States. Trump had been discharged from Walter Reed five days earlier.
And in the same breath he states the operating principle out loud: nothing in public, everything internally.
October 8: “crazy Scott Atlas”
Two days later, on Atlas’s television bookings:
“I just pinged Alyssa in an almost annoyed way asking what the heck happened to the list that Courtney sent down, when she is allowing crazy Scott Atlas to be on FOX. I think [I] got her attention since she texted right back and said that she will follow-up with Courtney.”
The same day, Fauci forwarded Francis Collins an article attacking the Great Barrington Declaration, and separately circulated a piece calling focused protection a deadly delusion. This is the week the GBD was signed, and the internal response was immediate.
October 14: “it’s him or us”
On the morning of October 14, a group of veteran AIDS activists and academics — Peter Staley, Gregg Gonsalves of Yale, Mark Harrington, David Barr — emailed Fauci and Birx under the subject line “This is nuts.”
Staley’s message is blunt:
“Isn’t it time for drawing a red-line regarding Atlas? The last thing the WH wants right now is seeing headlines saying Fauci and Birx resigned from the task force in protest. Why is this crazy man with no infectious disease experience cock-blocking all your access to the president... It’s time for you both to tell Pence, ‘it’s him or us.’“
Fauci replied that afternoon:
“I am trying to get this jerk shut down by working from within the White House. They promise they will handle it and nothing happens. I will keep trying.”
Birx answered the group too:
“I am just glad it’s in the open who has been undermining Tony and I in the WH and who was manipulating the data. We are pushing back very hard.”
The same night: Kushner
At 10:05 p.m. Eastern that evening, Fauci wrote to Birx:
“I had a long talk with Jared tonight about Scott Atlas. I really laid it on him, but he still does not completely understand how dangerous this guy is. He is still in the realm of ‘differences of opinion’. You have got to speak with Jared and confirm what I said that this guy is killing people. I likened him [to] the AIDS denialists from the 1980s.“
Two things about that email.
First, the comparison. For Anthony Fauci, whose career was forged in the AIDS crisis, calling someone an AIDS denialist is the most severe charge he has. He deployed it against a Stanford professor of radiology over a disagreement about pandemic policy — in writing, to a colleague, asking her to repeat it to the President’s son-in-law.
Second, the corroboration. Fauci’s personal diary, released separately by Senator Rand Paul’s committee, records a conversation with Kushner about Atlas that same night. Two independently obtained document sets, two different FOIA tracks, the same evening.
Only one person here is being a jerk, and it ain’t Scott.
October 16: “Please speak out for me”
Two days later, Fauci wrote to Birx that he would miss the Task Force meeting — a routine colonoscopy, “not for CNN consumption ☺” — and left instructions:
“Over the past week I have come out very strongly publicly against the ‘Great Barrington Declaration’... Scott Atlas may try to counter this. Please speak out for me.“
He then previewed Atlas’s expected arguments about post-COVID syndromes and cardiac MRI findings and asked Birx again: “Please speak out when he tries to play these things down.“
By October 18:
“Atlas did not go to the TF meeting, but he is present at the daily ‘huddle’ with the Vice President, Jared, and the other senior staff where he spouts his nonsense. He is driving Deb crazy.”
Birx has recently come out and thrown Dr. Fauci under the bus — but her hands are NOT clean here.
November: the closing argument
November 1, in Fauci’s own words: “that fool Scott Atlas.”
November 11, after a Politico piece on the Atlas–Fauci feud, Fauci wrote to White House communications director Alyssa Farah: “Do you folks have any control over this guy?”
Farah’s reply is the quiet confirmation that the campaign had been running for months:
“I Will immediately raise with Dr Atlas. This is unacceptable. He goes rogue and it’s wildly unhelpful. I’m so sorry you have to deal with this. I’ve advocated for his dismissal for months to no avail.“
By November 17, Fauci was tracking attendance — noting Atlas “was not physically present at the last meeting on November 9,” and that the Vice President had not called on him.
I remember that fateful day. Scott had headed back to California for Thanksgiving. President Trump had lost the election, and everything felt a bit uncertain as Scott’s tenure came to an end. I remember that day Mike Pence brought Dr. Burks and Dr. Fauci back onto the press platform, where they hadn’t been in quite a while. I texted Scott, and he was relieved that President Trump wasn’t there, but I could see the writing on the wall. Our political nightmare had just begun. 2021 and 2022 would prove fateful, as all of us know.
Scott Atlas resigned on December 1, 2020.
What this is, and what it isn’t
Fifteen weeks. From “we should sit down with Scott” and “give him the courtesy” to “this guy is killing people,” with a formal removal demand to the Vice President’s office in between.
A friend of ours online put it best: you can hear the line forming behind every one of these emails. Who will rid me of this meddlesome doctor?
Now the fair part, because we’ve been on the receiving end of unfair and we don’t intend to return the favor.
Nothing here is illegal. A federal official is entitled to think a colleague is wrong, to say so internally, and to argue for personnel changes. Fauci’s August engagement with the T-cell question was genuine — he commissioned real work from real immunologists rather than dismissing it. He also, by his own repeated statement, declined to attack Atlas publicly.
But that last point is the story, not the defense. “I am not going to address this publicly, but it must be addressed internally.” The public saw a scientific disagreement between two advisers, conducted with restraint. The private record shows a sustained fifteen-week effort to get one of them fired — routed through the Vice President’s chief of staff, the White House communications director, the President’s son-in-law, and a group of outside activists urging an ultimatum.
Americans were told there was a debate happening inside the White House. There was. They just weren’t told that one side was working to end it by removing the other man from the building.
We knew Scott Atlas. We worked for him for free because we believed the data supported what he was saying about focused protection, about schools, about the costs nobody was counting. We took a great deal of abuse for it.
Reading these emails six years on, we feel something close to vindicated. Mostly we feel like the argument was never allowed to be an argument.
Be sure to pick up Scott’s excellent book recounting his fight against Dr. Fauci
Source: NIH FOIA case 57534, seven volumes, 7,386 pages, obtained by Phillip W. Magness of the Independent Institute and released August 3, 2026. Quotations are verbatim from the released pages; OCR artifacts have been corrected and original typos preserved and marked [sic]. Every quotation above is citable to a specific volume, PDF page and Bates number. Corroborating diary material comes from the separate release by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, July 24, 2026.
Scott Atlas is another hero. Stanford prof, like Bhattacharya and yet was denigrated, ostracized and humiliated by this establishment deep state cabal
I read his book and it was stunning in the revelation the Fauci couldn’t or wouldn’t produce any actual evidence ie science The fact that he buffaloed everyone else with his BS using his credentials as evidence was also stunning how inept Pence was. He had to attack and destroy Atlas because Atlas had real facts and evidence and Fauci could not tolerate that just like Superman can’t tolerate Krypton