Yesterday, Jeffrey Goldberg, the infamous editor of The Atlantic, whose latest fake news article one week ago alleged that President Trump had cruelly disparaged members of the U.S. military, sent an email announcing the lineup of speakers for this year's annual Atlantic Festival of esteemed progressive thought leaders.  The two top highlighted speakers at the event, which this year will be streamed virtually online and free to access, are Hillary Clinton and Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Also on the bill are Nancy Pelosi; Stacey Abrams; Bill Gates; and the Marxist co-founder of Black Lives Matter, Alicia Garza.  Another speaker is Chesa Boudin, the San Francisco district attorney who was raised by unrepentant Weather Underground (W.U.) domestic terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn after his birth parents, who were also W.U. terrorists, were convicted and imprisoned for murder during an armed robbery.  In addition to Fauci, all of the other 112 speakers at the four-day-long event Sept. 21–24 are leftists, progressives, and social justice influencers of various stripes.  The only "Republican" is the anti-Trump RINO Maryland governor, Larry Hogan.

Six of the 113 speakers at the 2020 Atlantic festival.

It was almost exactly six months ago now, only a few days after the COVID-19 national lockdown was mandated, that the headline of my first article about Anthony Fauci at American Thinker described him as a "deep-state Hillary Clinton-loving stooge."  Do we need any more evidence that Fauci is returning to his fold and from all appearances is looking ahead — and feathering his nest — in advance of what he expects to be the Democrats retaking power after the November 3 elections?

As I wrote in my March 21, 2020 article on Fauci, he sent a gushing email to Hillary Clinton's top aide Cheryl Mills on January 23, 2013, congratulating Hillary for her performance at a congressional hearing investigating the September 11, 2012 Benghazi incident.  In the same email, Fauci expressed his "love" for President Obama's secretary of state:

Anyone who had any doubts about the Secretary's stamina and capability following her illness had those doubts washed away by today's performance before the Senate and the House. She faced extremely difficult circumstances at the Hearings and still she hit it right out of the park.

Please tell her that we all love her and are very proud to know her.

That March 21 blog post of mine about Fauci attracted the attention of the MSM big time.  In the two weeks following its publication, my blog, American Thinker, and I were attacked at some length by name and with links in four articles in the Washington Post; two in the New York Times (one of them on page 1A in a Sunday edition); and similar pieces in New York Magazine, Politico, Vanity Fair, and the Chicago Tribune among others.

During his 36 years as head of the NIH's National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Fauci — after almost four decades — is still the de facto czar in the government's ongoing war on AIDS.  Since he began working at the NIH in 1968, Fauci has shown himself to be a savvy, ultimate survivor of the highly politicized, deeply embedded administrative medical bureaucracy.  With an expertise in working the media, he tends to follow the way the political winds are blowing, expanding his power incrementally during the administrations of Presidents Reagan, Bush the elder, Clinton, Bush the younger, Obama, and now Trump.

Dr. Anthony Fauci interviewed live by John Roberts on the Fox News channel, Sept. 9, 2020.

Speaking of politically savvy: Earlier this week, in an extensive live interview on the Fox News channel (video here), Fauci appeared to come to President Trump's aid — in effect throwing the president a much needed lifeline — regarding the controversies arising from some troubling quotes attributed to the president in Bob Woodward's new anti-Trump book Rage.

From a transcript of the interview on Wednesday provided by Fox News:

JOHN ROBERTS, FOX NEWS GUEST-ANCHOR:  Joining me now is Dr. Anthony Fauci of the Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases.

Dr. Fauci, great to see you this afternoon.

So let me get your response to this. President Trump, according to Woodward, says back in February, that he knew how serious this was going to be, but all the way into March said he always wanted to play it down, because he didn't want to create a panic.

You were there through that whole thing. Was that the playbook? Or was that the president just going his own direction?

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI, DIRECTOR, NIAID: You know, I don't think so, John.

I mean, I don't recall anything different than in our discussions that we had with the president that he said things quite similar publicly. So I didn't read the book. I didn't really go over any of the text, since it just came out.

But you know, in my discussions and the discussions of other task force members with the president, we're talking about the reality of what was going on, and then when we would get up in front of the press conferences, which were very, very common after our discussions with the president, he really didn't say anything different than we discussed when we were with him.

So I may not be tuned in to the right thing that they're talking about, but I didn't really see any discrepancies between what he told us and what we told him and what he ultimately came out publicly and said.

ROBERTS: So did you get a sense that he was or wasn't playing this down?

FAUCI: No. No, no, I didn't. I didn't get any sense that he was distorting anything. I mean in my discussions with him, they were always straightforward about the concerns that we had. We related that to him.

And when he would go out, I'd hear him discussing the same sort of things. He would often say, we just got through with a briefing with the group from the task force and would talk about it. So, no, it may have happened, but I have not seen that kind of distortion.

In recent weeks, President Trump has appeared to favor the advice and counsel of the newest appointee to his White House Coronavirus Task Force, Scott Atlas, M.D., senior fellow in scientific philosophy and public policy at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.  Atlas rose to prominence this year after frequent appearances on Fox News channel programs and in a number of published articles where he advocated solutions to COVID-19 very different from Fauci's.  Reports are that outsider Atlas has effectively supplanted Fauci as the president's key adviser on the issue.  No wonder, then, that Fauci, at the same time that he defends President Trump, would be staking his claim at trendy elitist events like the Atlantic Festival for a return to prominence in case Joe Biden is his next boss.

Portion of The Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg's email promoting the Atlantic Festival.

Peter Barry Chowka is a veteran journalist who writes about politics, media, popular culture, and health care for American Thinker and other publications.  He also appears in the media, including recently as a contributor to BBC World News.  Peter's website is http://peter.media.  His YouTube channel is here.  For updates on his work, follow Peter on Twitter at @pchowka.