Republicans on a Senate committee have voted to refer Dr. Anthony Fauci to the Department of Justice for contempt of Congress after he asserted his Fifth Amendment right to avoid answering the panel’s questions about the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Senate Homeland Security Committee voted 8-7 on party lines Thursday to refer the charge against the infectious disease expert to Donald Trump’s administration, which will decide whether to prosecute the 85-year-old former National Institutes of Health official.
Fauci declined to answer questions more than 100 times during last week’s hearing, citing his constitutional right against self-incrimination.
The committee’s Republican chair Rand Paul has argued that Fauci forfeited his Fifth Amendment right after he received a presidential pardon from former President Joe Biden covering any alleged offenses between 2014 and January 2025, a period that includes Fauci’s response to the pandemic and the actions at the center of Republicans’ questions.
Democratic members of the committee have argued that Paul was trying to lead Fauci into what Sen. Maggie Hassan called a “political trap” by making a misstatement to be prosecuted by Trump’s “weaponized” Justice Department, while Democrat Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal compared the hearings to Joseph McCarthy-era attempts to prosecute political enemies.
The committee’s top Democrat Gary Peters also argued that the vote will create a “damaging precedent” that will make it harder for any congressional committee to compel witness testimony in future investigations.
“They will point to this vote as a justification for refusing to appear at all,” Peters said.
Republicans on the panel rejected five attempts from Democratic members to delay Thursday’s vote.
The referral for contempt to the office of U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C. Jeanine Pirro would need a grand jury indictment for prosecution, which her office has struggled to secure in several high-profile cases.
A conviction on criminal contempt of Congress carries a fine of up to $100,000 and a prison sentence of up to 12 months.
Fauci delivered brief opening remarks during his testimony to the committee on July 29 before declining to answer the committee’s questions.
“Given Senator Paul's obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution, his repeated slanderous comments about me, and recently his publicly releasing my unredacted personal diary aimed at embarrassing and intimidating me, the only conclusion I can reach is that the sole reason he is calling me before this Committee is to get me to say something, anything, that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, ‘Behind bars,’” Fauci told the committee.
“Any reasonable person who has followed his unhinged obsession with me would readily come to the same conclusion,” he added.
“Therefore, although it pains me to say so, because of the respect I have for the legislative branch of government, and my decades-long record of cooperating with Congress, under the advice of my attorneys, I will invoke my right under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution to refrain from answering your questions,” Fauci said.
Democratic members of the panel argued Paul, of Kentucky, has been trying to trap Fauci into making a potential misstep that could lead to perjury charges.
Paul later ejected Fauci’s attorney David Schertler from the room after trying to defend him against Paul’s threats of “consequences” and “repercussions” for Fauci’s refusal to testify.
“You don’t get to do that. That’s one thing you give up when you take the Fifth Amendment,” Paul said during last week’s hearing. “You don’t get to put your lawyer forward to justify. You can do it in the press. ... He was out of order and it was appropriate to have him ejected.”
Blumenthal said that even in the “darkest days of the McCarthy hearings,” witness counsel was allowed to speak.
“We should hear from his counsel … so we can hear from his side of the legal argument here,” he said Thursday.
“I would simply predict … that based on the long history of assertion of self-incrimination rights, there is virtually no chance that a court would actually approve any contempt because he had a well-founded fear of self-incrimination, which entitled him to invoke the Fifth Amendment,” Blumenthal said Thursday.
Schertler later told The Independent that it was “outrageous for Senator Paul to exclude his counsel for making a legitimate legal point” by trying to state that Fauci has a valid right to assert a Fifth Amendment privilege.
Republicans on the panel used Fauci’s stock response invoking the Fifth to ridicule him; Republican Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley asked him basic questions about the color of his tie and the day of the week before labeling him a “narcissist and a megalomaniac and a liar.”
“You don’t have any rights under the Fifth Amendment because you’ve been pardoned,” Hawley told him. “You know that. Your lawyers sitting behind you, now shifting nervously in your chairs, they know it.”
