In recent days, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and his wife, Katie Miller, have publicly denounced Anthony Fauci, who is back in the spotlight over his role during the Covid-19 pandemic.

After Fauci testified before Congress Wednesday, Stephen Miller cast him as part of the “health care establishment” opposed to President Donald Trump in a Fox News appearance. Katie Miller, a podcaster, went further, accusing Fauci of causing “decades of harm” to children and calling for him to face jail time in X posts in recent weeks.

But the couple’s relationship with the former public health official was once much different, according to a new report.

Redacted entries from Fauci’s recently released diary suggest the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who helped spearhead the Trump administration’s pandemic response, was close with Katie Miller, who in 2020 served as Vice President Mike Pence’s director of communications.

Fauci wrote about giving medical advice to the couple, including after Katie Miller tested positive for Covid while pregnant and when Stephen Miller later tested positive himself, NOTUS reported.

“I am calling katie frequently to check on her couple time per day. She is very anxious about getting very ill since she is 10 weeks pregnant. Tonight she had an anxiety reaction. I calmed her over the phone,” Fauci wrote on May 9, 2020.

In a separate entry, Fauci wrote that he spoke with the physicians of the couple’s child to talk about the child’s medical care.

On May 6, 2020, he wrote, “katie Miller and I laugh at each other in the Sit Room.” Elsewhere he labeled her “smart” and “great.”

Some of those entries, published earlier this month by Senator Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican, have since been redacted. While Katie Miller’s name pops up 56 times in the original more than 1,100-page document, it only appears 37 times in a revised version, according to a NOTUS analysis.

When reached by the outlet, Katie Miller acknowledged that, during the early days of the pandemic, she was in regular contact with Fauci and that sometimes entailed talking about non-work issues. At the time, she said she believed him to be “incredibly self-centered and sought to promote himself above the good of the people.”

“He was not my doctor. He was not my friend. He was a work colleague who called me for work purposes, and in the course of a phone call, you would discuss other things,” she said.

She added that she deliberately led Fauci to believe they were on friendly terms so that he “did not leak against me or my husband.”

Fauci, an immunologist, became a household name while helping lead President Donald Trump’s response to the pandemic. Though he initially won praise from Trump, he later drew fierce criticism from him and many conservatives who opposed pandemic restrictions.

“I grew tired of him…he wanted to close everything down,” the president told Fox News this week.

Fauci’s appearance at a Senate committee hearing yesterday came after Paul subpoenaed him to answer questions about the origins of the virus and his handling of lockdown measures. Paul and other Republicans pointed to Fauci’s diary entries as evidence that he knowingly misled the public, including about the origins of the virus.

Fauci, who received a pardon from former President Joe Biden, invoked the Fifth Amendment right to avoid self-incrimination and declined to answer each question.

In his opening statement, Fauci accused Paul of an “obvious obsession” with seeking his prosecution and making “repeated slanderous comments about me.” Democrats on the committee also came to the former public health official’s defense, with Connecticut Senator Dick Blumenthal painting the attacks on him as part of a “larger campaign against science and facts.”

The Independent has contacted Katie Miller, Stephen Miller and Fauci for comment.