The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, chaired by Republican Rand Paul, voted to hold world-renowned immunologist and infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress on 6 August. The vote, which was 8-5 along party lines, follows a hearing the previous week that he attended under a subpoena issued by Paul in June. Rather than bringing the resolution for a vote before the full Senate as is typical, Paul immediately sent it to the US Department of Justice.
Now the US attorney for the District of Columbia, Jeanine Pirro, will decide whether to move forward with prosecuting Fauci, which would require her to secure an indictment from a grand jury. Should that happen, he could face a fine and a up to one year in prison per count.
Rand and fellow Republicans senators on the committee say the 85-year-old Fauci – who helped guide the US response to the Covid‑19 pandemic – defied a congressional subpoena by refusing to answer questions during a hearing before the Senate last week. On the advice of his lawyers, Fauci invoked his fifth amendment right against self-incrimination under the US Constitution about 100 times during the recent hearing.
Republicans on the panel are arguing that Fauci, who headed the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for 38 years under seven different administrations, was not entitled to plead the fifth amendment. They say this was because he had already been granted a pre-emptive federal pardon by former President Biden and, therefore, faced no real threat of prosecution.
Paul and Republican colleagues are accusing Fauci of manipulating intelligence on the origins of the Covid-19 virus and lying to Congress to hide alleged wrongdoing by the NIH related to funding research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. Fauci denies all these accusations. They wanted him to answer questions related to these matters at the 29 July hearing, but Fauci and his lawyer said he had good reason to believe that this could result in criminal charges because of Paul’s public remarks that he wanted to put him in prison.
When the Homeland Security Committee voted on the resolution on 6 August, the top Democrat on the panel, Gary Peters, suggested that Paul’s goal in subpoenaing Fauci was to force him to make statements that could open new avenues to circumvent Biden’s pardon.
Last month, the day before Fauci’s appearance before the committee, Paul released more than 1000 pages of what he said were Fauci’s personal journal entries from during the Covid-19 pandemic, claiming that they show ‘what he wrote privately and what he told the country are two different stories’.
Then on 5 August, the day before the Senate Homeland Security Committee was set to vote on whether to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress, the chairman of its oversight investigations subcommittee, Republican Ron Johnson, announced that he had obtained a copy of a government-issued cell phone that Fauci used during the pandemic. ‘Hopefully, this device will address many of the questions he refused to answer at last week’s hearing,’ Johnson wrote on the social media platform X.
This vote to approve Fauci’s contempt resolution came despite five separate motions introduced by Democrats on the panel to postpone its consideration pending various actions, including testimony from legal experts on Fauci’s right to protect himself from self-incrimination. Those resolutions all ultimately failed along party lines.
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