[codefreeordie]

Oh, it is very likely that there's all sorts of things of that sort that he doesn't recall. And lots of others that he probably recalls but not with enough certainty to talk about under oath.

Whether or not he approved a particular grant personally eight years ago, it's reasonable for him not to recall. Or, at least, it would be reasonable other than that, of course, he's known for ages that he was going to be asked about this specific thing and, as counsel points out many times in his objections, Fauci prepared heavily for the deposition. It would be very reasonable for him to have read up on the grants he knew he was going to be asked about to be able to recall basic facts about them.

But even then, most of the "do not recall" responses really aren't the damaging parts of the deposition.

I did like the part where Fauci was handed an email he had written where he discussed a paper and described it as a gain-of-function paper [shortly after having testified that nobody used the terminology "gain-of-function" anymore, since it was overbroad and vague], and he was asked whether, in this email, he had referred to the paper as a gain-of-function paper or not (with the text of his email literally in his hands) and his counsel objects on the grounds that it was a "mischaracterization" to assume that, because the email was written by Fauci, that it contained his words.

That actually ends up being one of the more damaging parts of the testimony -- not because it's some big admission that this study was doing gain-of-function -- everybody knows that -- but because Fauci has repeatedly testified that NIAID was not funding any coronavirus-related gain-of-function studies. If Fauci had not described the study using the phrase "gain-of-function", his argument that "gain-of-function is broad and mostly-meaningless" might possibly have carried the day -- he testified that way because that's what he was asked about, but maybe in his mind that phrase meant something else. But then there's the email where he talks specifically about the gain-of-function study which he knows (at the time he wrote the email about it) was NIAID-funded. So, if he ever testified [after writing that email] that NIAID did not fund any gain-of-function studies on coronaviruses, well... that would be perjury.

Still, relatively unlikely perjury charges will be made to stick (or even seriously attempted) -- Bannon remains the only person in basically forever to be actually prosecuted for lying to Congress, and unless Covid gets back to a state where the government is trying to reintroduce restrictions/mandates, I don't foresee anybody spending the political capital to try that case.

And all of that presupposes that that portion of the deposition is even admitted as evidence. It may or may not be -- there were, after all, standing objections. And while objecting to assuming that the sender of an email was its author is a bit specious, some of the other objections might not be as unreasonable.