WASHINGTON — Republicans on a U.S. Senate panel voted Thursday to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress after he declined to answer any questions at a hearing last week about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee voted along party lines to approve a resolution referring to the Justice Department charges that Fauci, a top public health official during the pandemic, violated a congressional subpoena when he repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and refused to answer any questions at a July 29 committee hearing.

Fauci asserted his Fifth Amendment right 111 times, even in response to Republicans’ questions about his tie color or the day of the week meant to test his strategy.

Chairman Rand Paul of Kentucky and other committee Republicans said Thursday that was a misuse of the privilege, in part because President Joe Biden issued a broad pardon to Fauci covering any conduct from 2014 to 2025.

“We are voting on whether a witness who has received the benefit of a sweeping federal pardon can be ordered by this committee to answer questions and then defy that order without consequence,” Paul said.

Walking into a ‘trap’?

Democrats raised a host of objections to the contempt resolution.

They said, as Fauci argued during the hearing, that Paul sought to trap Fauci. Biden’s pardon of Fauci would not cover new misstatements to Congress, Sen. Maggie Hassan, a New Hampshire Democrat, said. 

“The goal was to wait for Dr. Fauci to make any kind of misstatement and then have a weaponized Department of Justice file criminal charges for that new statement that would not have been covered by the pardon, leaving Dr. Fauci little choice but to invoke his constitutional right to not walk directly into a trap,” Hassan said.

Fauci said during an opening statement at last week’s hearing that he believed “any reasonable person” would conclude that Paul’s objective was to trip him up.

“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,’” he said. 

Weakening future investigations

Ranking Democrat Gary Peters of Michigan also said the partisan vote undermined the panel’s legitimacy.

He took particular exception to Paul’s intention to send the resolution directly to federal prosecutors without gaining approval from the full Senate, which would require a bipartisan vote to meet the chamber’s 60-vote threshold.

“No individual senator and no committee speaks for the entire Senate,” he said. “Institutional powers belong to the full body. Allowing one chairman to unilaterally assert those powers would invite future chairs in both parties to bypass the Senate whenever they cannot secure the support of their colleagues.”

Future witnesses could use the vote to justify not appearing before congressional committees, Peters said.

Highly public role

The July 29 hearing was a departure for Fauci, who, as one of the nation’s most visible public health officials during the pandemic, spoke publicly about it on a daily basis for several months. 

He has testified before congressional committees two dozen times since January 2020 and had never declined to answer lawmaker questions before last week. 

Fauci was a member of the coronavirus task force during President Donald Trump’s first administration and a chief medical adviser on COVID-19 during Biden’s term. He headed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases under presidents of both parties for nearly four decades.

As the pandemic response turned increasingly political in the months following nationwide containment efforts in early 2020, Republicans became more critical of measures that caused significant economic problems.

Sen. Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican who chaired the panel in 2020, said Thursday that learning what officials like Fauci knew at the time was key to understanding what led to the response he considered an overreaction.

“It’s been six years since the pandemic began,” he said. “We have not had a reckoning of what happened.”

WASHINGTON — Dr. Anthony Fauci, one of the nation’s most visible public health officials during the coronavirus pandemic, declined to answer questions from a U.S. Senate committee in a tense and confrontational hearing Wednesday, citing his Fifth Amendment rights. 

Fauci said during a brief opening statement he believed Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Rand Paul, R-Ky., was trying to get him to make statements under oath that would lead to criminal charges. 

“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,’” he said.  

Fauci added that “any reasonable person who has followed his unhinged obsession with me would readily come to the same conclusion.” 

“Therefore, although it pains me to do 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,” he said. 

Fauci was a member of the coronavirus task force during President Donald Trump’s first administration and a chief medical adviser on COVID-19 during President Joe Biden’s term. 

Repeated testimony

Fauci has testified publicly 13 times before Senate committees and 11 times before House committees since January 2020. This was the first time he declined to answer any questions from lawmakers.

Paul noted that former President Joe Biden pardoned Fauci for any actions he might have taken from Jan. 1, 2014 through Jan. 20, 2025. But he said that doesn’t cover any actions since then, including any statements to Congress that may not have been entirely accurate.  

“A pardon may protect a person from criminal prosecution. It doesn’t rewrite history,” Paul said. “It does not erase documents. It does not convert a misleading statement into a truthful one.”

Paul said the committee will hold a vote next week to hold Fauci in contempt for declining to answer questions under a subpoena. 

“There will be repercussions to your refusal to testify today,” he said. 

A member of Fauci’s legal team, seated beside him at the witness table, tried to speak several times but Paul refused to recognize him before having U.S. Capitol Police remove that lawyer from the room. 

Paul then said for the record that Fauci would “still have the advice of the other half a dozen attorneys that he brought along today.”

Origins of COVID-19

Paul alleged during his opening statement that Fauci, who was the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases when the pandemic began, didn’t give enough credit to theories the COVID-19 virus may have been created in a laboratory in China. 

He asked Fauci a series of questions about the pandemic and the types of research the federal government funded leading up to the outbreak. Each time, Fauci responded, “On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer, based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution.”

Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee ranking member Gary Peters, D-Mich., sought to remind his Republican colleagues that when he ran the panel, there was a bipartisan effort to look into the origins of the pandemic.  

“Rather than building on that work to strengthen our preparedness against future disasters, we are instead relitigating the past,” he said. 

Peters raised concerns that the country would likely face another pandemic at some point and that lawmakers should focus their efforts on the future, making sure public health agencies have the staff and funding they need. 

“COVID-19 exposed serious deficiencies in our nation’s public health infrastructure. We know that. More than one million Americans lost their lives and this committee should absolutely continue to examine how we can better prepare our nation against future biological threats,” he said. “Those are the kinds of forward-looking, life-saving questions that will help our nation be better prepared to protect the health and the safety of Americans when the next emergency occurs.”

Peters then sharply criticized the Trump administration, saying officials’ decisions on funding and staff have eroded the country’s safety net, including at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  

“The administration has hollowed out the public health workforce,” he said. “They have fired, pushed out and cut funding for public health personnel, shrinking the CDC workforce by a quarter.” 

Fauci’s decision not to answer questions didn’t stop Republicans and Democrats on the committee from asking him questions and making lengthy statements throughout the three-hour hearing.