Anthony Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination more than 100 times Wednesday during more than three hours of questioning by members of the Senate Homeland Security Committee.
Fauci served as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from 1984 to 2022 and as chief medical adviser to the president in 2021 and 2022. He has faced persistent criticism from Republican politicians over the federal response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
On the final day of his presidency, President Joe Biden issued Fauci a sweeping preemptive pardon covering actions dating to 2014.
During Wednesday’s hearing, Republican senators repeatedly attacked Fauci’s character and his pandemic-era decisions. Before the hearing, Senator Rand Paul, R-Kentucky, released more than 1,000 pages of Fauci’s personal diary and cited selected passages to accuse him of lying to the American public.
In his opening remarks, Fauci said he believed “the sole reason [Senator Paul] 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.’”
After the hearing, Paul announced that the committee would vote on whether to hold Fauci in contempt, a finding that could eventually lead to fines or imprisonment.
Paul repeatedly raised that possibility during the hearing as Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment rights. Fauci’s attorney, David Schertler, was removed from the hearing after objecting when Paul said Fauci did not have the right to invoke the Fifth Amendment.
In a brief interview Wednesday on Fox Business’ “The Evening Edit,” Senator Tommy Tuberville, R-Alabama, declared that Fauci “will eventually end up broke or in prison.”
“Because I tell you what’s going to happen,” Tuberville continued. “I’m eventually going to be the governor of Alabama and we had the most of anybody, per capita, of dying in this country. And we’re going to sue the heck out of this guy. He is going to court every day of his life for the rest of his life.”
The CDC mortality tracker does not list Alabama as having the nation’s highest per capita COVID-19 death rate in 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 or 2024.
“We’re going to go after the guy with everything we’ve got because the guy killed, or had something to do with killing, 9 million people,” Tuberville then claimed.
After Tuberville claimed Fauci bore partial responsibility for killing many times the number of Americans who have died from COVID-19, host Elizabeth MacDonald interrupted him.
“Yeah, we can’t prove that, right?” MacDonald asked. “That’s yet to be determined, how many people.”
Tuberville then said Fauci was “in on the gain-of-function.” As the term is commonly used, gain-of-function research involves altering pathogens to better understand how they develop and spread.
Earlier this month, the Trump administration released a new policy prohibiting federal funding for what it calls “dangerous gain-of-function research,” or research that could make a biological agent more dangerous.
In a public statement, Schertler portrayed the hearing as another instance of Paul persecuting his client.
“Over the past five years, Senator Paul’s obsession has been manifested in an enormous number of false accusations and outrageous statements about Dr. Fauci,” Schertler wrote. “These have appeared on numerous social media platforms, in podcasts, in an accusatory book he published with Dr. Fauci’s image on the cover, and in many television and public appearances.”
“Dr. Fauci devoted his lengthy career to saving millions of lives globally through scientific discovery and sound public health policy,” Schertler added. “The accusations that Chairman Paul continues to propagate are false and disgraceful, and we will examine all options to hold him accountable.”
