US Senate panel votes to hold Fauci in contempt for declining to answer COVID questions

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.”