Fauci invokes Fifth Amendment, declines to answer at Rand Paul hearing

WASHINGTON — Anthony Fauci, the former top U.S. infectious disease expert, declined to answer questions at a Senate hearing Wednesday, invoking his constitutional right against self-incrimination and accusing Republican Sen. Rand Paul of an "unhinged" campaign to see him imprisoned.

Fauci, who is 85 and retired in 2022, was subpoenaed by Paul of Kentucky, the chair of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and a longtime adversary. Fauci accused Paul of a campaign to see him imprisoned and refused to answer more than 100 questions.

Paul claimed Fauci was not allowed to plead the Fifth Amendment right to refrain from answering senators' questions, that a pardon from former President Joe Biden would not protect him, and that there would be consequences for refusing to answer. He said the committee scheduled a vote for next week to hold Fauci in contempt.

Fauci, who led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for 38 years, serving under multiple Republican and Democratic presidents, and became the face of the U.S. pandemic response, has long been criticized by President Donald Trump and many American conservatives. Before the hearing, Trump wrote of Fauci on social media: "His ideas were CRAZY!"

More than 1.1 million people died of COVID-19 in the United States, and the pandemic touched off a long-running effort by conservatives to assign blame for the toll of actions taken to stem the global health crisis. Fauci became the primary target of that anger, criticized for lockdown directives, guidance on mask-wearing and social distancing, and his promotion of vaccines, which became heavily politicized during the pandemic, despite being shown to be safe and effective.

He and many public health officials around the world recommended such measures based on scientific evidence available at the time of best practices to slow the spread of a novel and deadly virus for which there was no immunity, until a vaccine became available.

Biden preemptively pardoned Fauci on Jan. 19, 2025, to guard against "unjustified and politically motivated prosecutions" for allegations related to COVID or his role in the response. The pardon does not cover subsequent conduct.

Legal possibilities

Federal law makes it a crime to knowingly and willfully make a "materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation" to Congress, potentially exposing Fauci to prison if prosecutors decided he lied after being pardoned.

Republicans criticized Fauci for refusing to answer and claimed federal law and a 19th-century U.S. Supreme Court decision required him to testify.

The 1896 decision lets Congress compel testimony from witnesses by immunizing them from criminal prosecution for what they say, without violating the witnesses' Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

Paul had David Schertler, one of Fauci's lawyers, removed from the hearing after refusing to recognize his attempts to speak.

In a statement, Schertler called Paul's pursuit "an obsessive vendetta" and said the accusations "are false and disgraceful, and we will examine all options to hold him accountable."

Paul has for years called for Fauci's indictment and accused him of lying to Congress about whether the National Institutes of Health funded virus research in Wuhan, China, and of helping cover up COVID's origins.

‘Slanderous comments’

Fauci denies both claims and says he testified truthfully multiple times before Congress on these issues.

"Given Senator Paul's obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution, his repeated slanderous comments about me, and recently his publicly releasing my unredacted personal diary aimed at embarrassing and intimidating me," Fauci said, "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.'"

"Any reasonable person who has followed his unhinged obsession with me would readily come to the same conclusion," Fauci said.

Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., the committee's top Democrat, said in his opening statement that the hearing was biased and criticized the investigation for having predetermined conclusions.

"This hearing appears to be a culmination of months of biased and selected efforts by the majority, under the guise of a committee investigation, to basically legitimize a predetermined conclusion that was reached years ago," Peters said.

"It's not just what we investigate that matters, but how we conduct that investigation that also matters. One-sided investigations designed to validate predetermined conclusions do not serve the American people, who sent us to actually uncover the truth and to solve problems," Peters said.

Gain-of-function research is, broadly, work that modifies a pathogen in ways that could make it more transmissible or dangerous, though scientists disagree over how narrowly the term should be defined.

That disagreement is the crux of the Paul-Fauci dispute: Paul says the NIH funded such work in Wuhan and that Fauci lied when he denied it, while Fauci says the research did not meet the government's formal regulatory definition.

COVID-19's origins remain unresolved. The FBI said in 2023 that a leak from a laboratory in the central Chinese city of Wuhan likely caused the pandemic, a claim China said had "no credibility whatsoever." The CIA said in January 2025 it shifted its assessment and concluded a lab leak was likely, but with "low confidence," while four other U.S. intelligence agencies and the National Intelligence Council believe the virus most likely emerged via natural transmission.

This week, Paul published a 1,141-page tranche of Fauci's pandemic-era diary entries, spanning December 2019 through December 2022.