Senate Panel Votes to Hold Fauci in Contempt

The Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee on Thursday advanced a resolution to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress.

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The eight-to-five party line vote came in response to Fauci repeatedly invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination at a hearing last week to avoid Republicans’ questions regarding diary entries previously released by the committee. Those documents revealed the former head of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases gave the lab-leak hypothesis for the origin of the coronavirus more credit in private than he did in public at the beginning of the pandemic.

“Oversight is not a courtesy this committee extends or a favor a former official grants us,” Chairman Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky said at the committee meeting. “It is a constitutional obligation, and when voluntary cooperation ends, Congress must be able to compel compliance with its lawful demands. That is Congress’s compulsory instrument.”

Despite Paul’s tough talk, it is unclear just how much weight the committee’s passage of the resolution will carry. Ordinarily, the next stop would be for the resolution to advance to the Senate floor. Even if it were to pass there, it would not be self-executing, and the Department of Justice would need to decide whether to pursue charges against Fauci.

But the resolution might not even get a chance to pass the full Senate. The measure would be subject to the chamber’s 60-vote threshold to break a filibuster, and it is unlikely that it would receive the consent of enough Democrats to move toward final passage.

Rather than send it to the floor after the committee vote, Paul has said he plans to send it directly to the DOJ.

“There’s not a lot of precedent for a lot of this, but it isn’t a law, so there isn’t any exact procedure that it has to follow,” he told reporters earlier this week. Paul added that the committee would also include a legal brief on “whether or not the Fifth Amendment applies when you have a pardon.”

President Joe Biden a day before he left office issued Fauci a preemptive pardon covering any crimes he might have committed from January 1, 2014, to January 19, 2025.

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That is one reason why Paul’s previous pleas for the DOJ to prosecute Fauci have failed to elicit a case. The senator has referred Fauci to the department under both the Biden and Trump administrations, but neither one moved to bring charges.

Republicans have long called for prosecutions against the former health official. Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas said the federal government should appoint a special counsel to investigate him.

“What Fauci did would make Watergate look like some type of a Tiddlywinks game, with his cover-up, as well,” he told National Review. “That’s what really needs to be done. They need to get this out of Washington, D.C., and get the politics out of it. Americans deserve the truth.”

Democrats, meanwhile, have defended Fauci, accusing Republicans of unfairly targeting him and attempting to set up a perjury trap for him with last week’s hearing. They have noted that his pardon does not shield him from charges from potential state and local crimes or potential offenses following Biden’s departure from the White House.

“How is it possibly contempt for exercising a legal right when he is understandably fearful about the chairman pursuing him purposely to put him behind bars?” Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut told reporters Wednesday.

But the committee is likely not done with Fauci yet. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that the panel had obtained a copy of his iPhone, which could be the source of more document releases.

“Workers were forced to choose between a mandate and a job they needed,” Paul said Thursday. “Businesses closed and never reopened. Children lost years of school they will never get back. Americans lost the freedom to work, to worship, and to decide what went into their own bodies. Nothing we do today can undo those losses, but silence does not honor them either.”

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