Jake Tapper Blasts White House for Going After Fauci: ‘Deranged’ and Irresponsible to Attack Someone ‘Trying to Save Our Lives’

CNN’s Jake Tapper opened his show Wednesday tearing into the Trump administration for the attacks from inside the administration on its own coronavirus task force member Dr. Anthony Fauci.

This past weekend, an anonymous White House official sent out a statement to news outlets going after Fauci’s credibility. Then on Tuesday White House adviser Peter Navarro penned an op-ed going after Fauci.

The Trump administration has insisted that Navarro went rogue and did not go through the proper channels on the op-ed, with the president himself even knocking Navarro a bit today. Fauci himself actually pushed back a bit in an interview on the “bizarre” attacks against him.

Tapper said Navarro’s claim that Fauci has been wrong on everything is rather difficult to believe, before reviewing the internal criticisms of Fauci and the fact he has been very noticeably sidelined during the pandemic.

And while Fauci’s response to the attacks was rather “diplomatic,” as Tapper put it, the CNN host offered a more blunt assessment:

“The White House campaign to undermine Dr. Fauci is dishonest. It’s disgusting. It’s deranged. And at a time of a deadly pandemic, it is the ultimate in irresponsibility. Literally, more than 136,000 Americans are dead because of this virus. And instead of an aggressive national testing and contact tracing program, the White House is instead launching an aggressive smear campaign against a guy trying to save our lives.”

You can watch above, via CNN.