Fauci Faces Contempt Vote Thursday Following Tense Senate Appearance

A Senate panel will vote Thursday on whether to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress after he invoked the Fifth Amendment 111 times before the committee last week.

Fauci repeatedly invoked his right against self-incrimination despite having been granted a sweeping pardon by former President Joe Biden amid allegations that he misled Congress and the public about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who became the face of the public health response to the pandemic, was questioned about federal grant money that might have helped fund research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, a suspected source of the virus, before the outbreak of COVID-19. He has repeatedly denied allegations of funding China-based research on coronavirus and lying about it to Congress.

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which hosted Fauci last week, will vote on the contempt citation Thursday, Chairman Rand Paul, R-Ky., posted Tuesday on X.

“Despite having a pardon from President Biden spanning more than a decade, Fauci refused to answer a single question, even though he knew he couldn’t be charged for crimes during that period,” Paul stated.

If the committee approves a contempt of Congress citation, it will go to the full Senate floor for a vote. If the Senate approves, the citation could be used in a prosecution by the Justice Department.

Fauci served as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from 1984 to 2022 and was the chief medical adviser to Biden from 2021 to 2022.

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In his opening statement last Wednesday, before invoking his Fifth Amendment right, Fauci accused Paul of publishing excerpts of his diary, saved on government servers, from his time at NIAID. He said the publication was “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 that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, ‘behind bars,’” Fauci said.

Paul also posted on Monday, “The HSGAC hearing with Fauci was about accountability. He said one thing in public and another in private, controlled the narrative, and put politics above truth. Without real reform, the next unelected bureaucrat will do it again.”

Biden’s sweeping pardon of Fauci was performed via autopen rather than with the 46th president’s signature, noted Mike Howell, president of the Oversight Project, in a statement after last week’s hearing. The Oversight Project, a watchdog group, has argued that the use of the autopen for hundreds of documents during Biden’s term might not be legally binding.

“As a leader of the free-face movement, which unfortunately was a real thing due to Fauci’s insane dictates like mask-mandates, I feel validation that Fauci was unable to offer a single word in his own defense,” Howell said. “That validation is vastly increased by the fact that our work on breaking the “scandal of the century” in the autopen matter has put Fauci in a no-win scenario. Fauci shouldn’t be able to rely on a bogus pardon.”

This article was updated with the confirmed date of the committee vote.