Episode 296 with Leighton Grey, KC — August 4, 2026
There is a moment in the July 29 Senate hearing that tells you everything.
Senator Josh Hawley leans in and asks Anthony Fauci what day of the week it is. On the advice of counsel, Fauci declines to answer. What colour tie are you wearing? On the advice of counsel, he declines. What colour is the carpet in front of you? Same answer.
Then Hawley springs it: you don’t have privilege. You were granted a full pardon, and you know it, and your lawyers know it — which is why they’re squirming in their seats right now.
This is the man who told a reporter that an attack on him was an attack on science itself.
What a trial lawyer sees
My guest this week is Leighton Grey, KC. He isn’t commenting from the cheap seats. He spent the pandemic in Canadian courtrooms fighting COVID cases, and cross-examination is a craft he’s studied for years and taught to other lawyers at seminars. When he says Hawley’s questioning was beautifully built, he means it as a technician.
Grey’s read on the legal position is worth sitting with, because most of the coverage has muddled it.
The Fifth Amendment protects you from being made an instrument against yourself. But a pardon removes the jeopardy — and where there is no jeopardy, there is no privilege. Grey points to a US Supreme Court decision from roughly 120 years back: one who has received a pardon cannot stand on his privilege. It’s a principle with deep roots in the common law tradition, and it operates in Britain and Canada too. Our own version lives in the Charter.
The nuance people are missing is that a congressional hearing is not a courtroom. There’s no judge, no jury, no prosecution. Fauci’s pardon still shields him from being charged — but it does nothing to shield him from a contempt citation for refusing to answer a body that subpoenaed him. Contempt has teeth. Steve Bannon did time for it.
Grey’s honest prediction: the contempt vote probably fails. Fauci still has too many friends in that House, and the American press is running cover for him and painting Rand Paul as the villain of the piece.
And there’s a loose thread nobody has pulled yet. If that pardon was signed by autopen rather than by Joe Biden’s hand, what is it actually worth? Trump has said publicly he won’t disturb it — but a president’s forbearance isn’t the end of the matter. Others can attack it by other means.
The iceberg
Grey sees two roads out of this, and only one of them is any good.
On the first, Fauci becomes the Nixon of the story. He absorbs every sling and arrow, everyone equally culpable walks away clean, and the whole thing dissolves into the next news cycle. That, he says, would be a real pity.
On the second, the hearing cracks something open — a genuine avenue for public scrutiny into what these drugs did, who was harmed, why, and who is responsible.
Because Fauci is the tip of it. Grey’s own framing: the little part sticking out above the waterline, with something enormous underneath that we can only guess at. Consider what the man controlled. As head of NIAID and in his role at NIH, no medical research grant in the United States got approved without passing his desk. That is not a scientific position. That is a gatekeeping position — and it explains why the journals of that era read the way they did, and why serious scientists like Jay Bhattacharya and Peter McCullough couldn’t get published and got cancelled instead.
When Fauci said I am science, Grey argues, he was making an accurate statement about power, not a boastful one about knowledge.
One detail I raised on the show that still stops people cold: the head of the Department of Bioethics at the NIH was Fauci’s own wife. He was, functionally, married to his own ethics oversight.
Bringing it home: the Allison Inquiry
September 8 through 11, in the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa, Canadians injured by these drugs will testify under oath.
Grey has been calling for a royal commission for five years. What we got instead was the National Citizens Inquiry — the single greatest record of what happened to Canadians during COVID — which the mass media almost entirely ignored, and which no MP or MLA saw fit to attend. Danielle Smith hinted at an Alberta inquiry when she ran in 2022; what arrived were the Manning and Davidson reports, and both were left on a shelf.
So the Allison Inquiry matters. Roughly 800 people have applied to be witnesses. Shawn and Teresa Buckley, who were the engine of the NCI, are involved again. Dean Allison is carrying it, and Grey admits he was astonished that his own party leadership didn’t kill it — one phone call and the whip could have ended it. Poilievre told him to go ahead.
Grey’s framing has stayed with me all week: the pandemic is an open wound on Canadian society. Not just the physical harm — the loss of trust, the loss of any confidence that this is a country you can be proud of. He describes the NCI as one of the only times since 2020 that felt like the Canada he grew up in. There were tears. There was laughter. He believes God was in that room.
Meanwhile the federal compensation program — $55 million set aside for the injured — burned roughly three-quarters of itself on administration. Eighty per cent of Canadians took at least one dose. Do that arithmetic and see how it feels.
What you can do
Apply to testify. Whether you’re speaking for yourself, for a family member, or for someone who didn’t survive it — get it on the record. Panel testimony or a recorded story, both matter. allisoninquiry.com · covidtestimony.com
Press your MP to be in the room. There will be pushback. That’s fine — it draws more attention.
Support the litigation. Grey’s office is running two class actions: Burke, on behalf of the unvaccinated, claiming public vilification by their own government and restriction of Charter mobility rights; and Taylor, on behalf of the vaccine injured, with Alberta’s Drew Taylor as representative plaintiff. Both need help. gwsllp.ca
These cases are moving against real resistance. The Ontario Court of Appeal held in Hartman that the Government of Canada owed no duty of care to a young man who died after a single dose. That is the law in this country right now, and it is a damaging precedent for everything that comes after.
Watch the full episode. And share it — we have to wake more Canadians up to what’s going on.
I’ll be in Ottawa in September, documenting the inquiry for you. Coming up next: Michelle Worton, one of the witnesses.
God bless. — Bruce
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Coming up: Capitalism and Morality, Calgary 2026 — September 11–12 at the Croatian Cultural Centre, VIP dinner Friday night. Code UTN10 for 10% off. Capitalism & Morality
