Fauci pleads the fifth 100+ times as Senate eyes contempt charges
Republicans say newly released COVID diary contradicts Fauci's public claims as Sen. Rand Paul moves toward contempt vote.
Author: Alex Dhaliwal
Hours after the release of a bombshell government diary, Dr. Anthony Fauci repeatedly pleaded the Fifth before a U.S. Senate committee Tuesday, refusing to answer lawmakers’ questions more than 100 times under subpoena.
“Although it pains me to do so... 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, 85, said in his opening statement before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
For the rest of the hearing, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) answered question after question with the same response: he would not testify, citing his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
The Fifth Amendment states that no person “shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.”
Fauci received a sweeping preemptive pardon from former President Joe Biden in 2025 covering potential federal offences tied to his government service during the pandemic.
Despite that pardon, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who chairs the committee, said lawmakers will vote next week on whether to recommend criminal contempt charges after accusing Fauci of defying a valid congressional subpoena.
“We believe that with his immunity from criminal liability, that he didn’t need to hide behind the Fifth Amendment, and that maybe the Fifth Amendment doesn’t attach when you have a pardon in place,” Paul told reporters after the hearing.
Federal law makes it a crime for a witness subpoenaed by Congress to refuse to answer pertinent questions, although whether the Fifth Amendment privilege remains available after a presidential pardon is a legally disputed question that has not been definitively settled by the courts.
The dramatic hearing came one day after Paul released a diary Fauci kept while overseeing the federal government’s pandemic response.
Among the most explosive entries was a March 2020 account in which Fauci wrote that he personally persuaded then-New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio to shut schools.
“I convinced him based on what I was saying publicly and my conversation tonight to close the NYC schools,” Fauci wrote.
In another entry, Fauci described speaking with California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s chief of staff, who told him the governor decided to close California schools, bars and restaurants based on Fauci’s television appearances.
The diary appears to conflict with Fauci’s repeated public claims that he was not responsible for school closures.
Paul also pointed to diary entries describing an early February 2020 conference call with prominent scientists about the origins of COVID-19.
According to Fauci’s notes, nine of the 11 scientists on the call believed it was possible the virus’s furin cleavage site had been inserted by humans.
Paul argued that assessment is significant because a later-publicized research proposal described plans to insert a furin cleavage site into bat coronaviruses in experiments that could have been conducted in China.
“This was either an extraordinary coincidence or a smoking gun,” Paul said Monday while releasing the diary.
Throughout the pandemic, Fauci consistently maintained that COVID-19 most likely emerged naturally and repeatedly denied that his agency funded gain-of-function research.
Former President Donald Trump weighed in on the controversy Monday, writing on Truth Social that he had “always said” the virus came from a laboratory in Wuhan and accusing Fauci of trying to protect China.
Meanwhile, a federal inspector general previously concluded that NIAID funded risky research at a Wuhan laboratory and found federal oversight of those experiments was inadequate.
“Your primary concern was hiding the fact that you approved funding for this dangerous research,” Paul told Fauci during Tuesday’s hearing.
Fauci’s attorney, David Schertler, was removed from the hearing after attempting to address senators during the proceedings.
Democrats dismissed the Republican-led investigation as politically motivated. Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), the committee’s ranking member, argued Paul’s inquiry was driven by a predetermined conclusion and said Congress should instead focus on preparing for future public health emergencies and overseeing current federal health policy.
But Fauci’s repeated refusal to answer questions reverberated beyond Washington.
Former Conservative MP Dean Allison said the hearing vindicated many Canadians who challenged pandemic policies, arguing that “things were done wittingly wrong during the pandemic in Canada as well, similar to the U.S.”
Allison called for apologies to those “who were ostracized, blamed and cancelled” for questioning public health measures, and urged accountability for “politicians, bureaucrats and media who dictated and coordinated their flagrant decrees at the expense of the people.”