Watch Dr. Anthony Fauci plead the Fifth at Capitol Hill hearing
(CNN) — Dr. Anthony Fauci spent decades nurturing his reputation as the government’s most recognizable, most accessible and often most voluble authority on the nation’s public health crises.
But on Wednesday, under intense scrutiny and the ever-present threat of prosecution, Fauci spent a congressional hearing that spanned well over two hours uttering only a single, 24-word sentence: “Under the advice of my attorneys, I will invoke my right under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution to refrain from answering your questions.”
The retired government scientist, who guided the US Covid-19 pandemic response across two administrations, invoked his constitutional right against self-incrimination more than 100 times throughout a high-profile and often-contentious hearing that Republicans had hoped would open him up to claims of perjury.
The committee chairman, Sen. Rand Paul, has since vowed to force a vote next week holding Fauci in contempt of Congress over his refusal to testify, extending a yearslong investigation aimed at validating his and other Republicans’ belief that Fauci orchestrated a cover-up of the origins of the coronavirus.
Yet in the meantime, the hearing that Paul had touted as an opportunity to get long-elusive answers about the Covid crisis only appeared to deepen sharp partisan divisions that have scarred the US for more than six years — and made Fauci a political lightning rod.
Frustrated Republicans sought to cast Fauci’s noncooperation as fresh evidence of culpability, despite being unable to prove it. For Democrats, the hearing marked just the latest episode in a long-running GOP effort to downplay the seriousness of a pandemic that killed more than one million Americans — many of them on President Donald Trump’s watch.
“This hearing is the culmination of a years-long crusade, which started more than six years ago when Dr. Fauci dared to contradict President Trump,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut. “The campaign to vilify you, Dr. Fauci, is just one part of this larger campaign against science and facts — a campaign that has made Americans less safe.”
Fauci offered a brief yet blistering opening statement before invoking his Fifth Amendment rights, arguing that Paul’s “obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution” justified his refusal to speak.
“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,’” Fauci said of Paul, who had subpoenaed for his appearance.
Yet in an unusual move, Republican senators proceeded with the hearing anyway, peppering the scientist with sharp questions, forcing Fauci to repeat, over and over, that he was invoking his constitutional right.
When the hearing was near its end, Paul said he would hold a committee vote on contempt next week – which could initiate a process that would result in the Justice Department considering whether to charge Fauci with a crime.
Despite refusing to answer any questions, Fauci appeared frustrated on several occasions with Republicans’ accusations, including that he guided infectious disease research that led to the Covid-19 pandemic, a charge without evidence that he has denied in the past.
Republicans were visibly exasperated with the former NIAID director, too, shaking their heads and rolling their eyes as he repeated his invocations.
At times, attendees laughed when Republican senators tested the boundaries of his response, asking him questions like the color of his tie and what the amendment he was invoking protects.
Fauci sat grimly unsmiling, often not looking at the senators who questioned him.
And in one extraordinary confrontation, Paul had Fauci’s attorney escorted from the room after he tried repeatedly to interject. The clash prompted gasps and a scattering of applause from a contingent of anti-Fauci attendees who had packed into the hearing room.
Fauci’s lawyer, David Schertler, later called his removal “outrageous” and further evidence of the “baseless and vindictive nature of this proceeding” in a statement to CNN.
At another point in the hearing, Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno of Ohio asked attendees to stand if they lost their job or were otherwise harmed by Covid-19 policies, including vaccine requirements and school closures.
Roughly 15 people, including Fox News anchor Laura Ingraham, who had been seated behind Fauci in the room, stood up. Some of those who stood, including a Kentucky pediatrician and a representative from Feds for Freedom – an anti-vaccine requirements advocacy group – told CNN after the hearing they believed the coronavirus leaked from a lab.
The hearing nevertheless did little to advance claims by Paul and other prominent Republicans that Fauci had covered up the origins of the pandemic.
Paul has long contended that the NIH funded viral research in Wuhan, China, that made more virulent and contagious strains of coronavirus. Known as gain-of-function research, these types of studies are often used to better understand how viruses spread and how to treat them.
Fauci has denied through the years that the NIH ever funded studies related to the coronavirus that created the 2020 pandemic. Federal reviews of the outbreak have been inconclusive about its source, but there is no evidence the virus was engineered and leaked from a virology lab.
Some of Fauci’s chief antagonists have been granted powerful perches since President Donald Trump’s return to the White House, including US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a former anti-vaccine activist who had sparred with Fauci for years.
Paul and Kennedy had openly vowed to find new ways to pursue perjury charges against Fauci, with Kennedy saying earlier this week he led an eight-month search within HHS for new evidence to use, eventually turning up entries from the scientist’s diary on a government server.
Paul published them ahead of the hearing – a move Fauci described as “aimed at embarrassing and intimidating me.”
Several Republican lawmakers used the hearing to attack Fauci’s conduct and his credibility, while pointing to his invocation of the Fifth Amendment as evidence he was unwilling to be transparent.
“Let the record record that the witness has refused to answer whether there’s a folder in front of him based on his Fifth Amendment right,” Paul said at one point.
Democrats on the committee sought at times to defend Fauci and criticize Republicans’ efforts in recent years to downplay the pandemic.
“It is unfortunate that you have been put in the position that you are in today, and it must be enormously frustrating to know that this hearing is designed to entrap you,” Sen. Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire said to Fauci.
Legal wrangling ahead
Fauci, the face of American infectious disease research dating back to the HIV/AIDs crisis, has appeared more than 250 times before Congress and has never invoked the Fifth Amendment until Wednesday.
The 85-year-old former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has previously appeared before lawmakers to deny, under oath, allegations brought by Paul of obscuring the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic and controversial infectious disease research.
Pressure from Paul and others led President Joe Biden to preemptively pardon Fauci during his last days in office, shielding Fauci from charges pertaining to any comments made in previous years.
But after Paul became chairman of a major Senate committee that could wield subpoena power, he and other Republicans had sought new ways to get Fauci to open himself up to prosecution.
“A pardon that protects a person from criminal prosecution doesn’t rewrite history. It does not erase documents. It does not convert a misleading statement to a truthful one, and it does not prevent Congress from establishing what happened,” Paul said in his opening remarks.
That goal drove the decision by Fauci and his legal team to invoke his Fifth Amendment rights, friends and advisers to Fauci told CNN, after concluding that there was little to be gained by engaging.
They had, they said, also closely watched House Republicans’ recent handling of former special counsel Jack Smith’s own closed-door committee testimony, which was seized upon to refer him for possible prosecution based on suggestions he’d made false statements. Like Fauci, Smith has come under extended scrutiny from Trump allies, who were angered by his investigation into Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
But Fauci’s decision to invoke the Fifth Amendment has created an opening for Republicans to tee up the next stage of their inquiry: A committee contempt vote aimed at prompting the courts to weigh in on whether Fauci can use the constitutional protection to avoid testifying.
Paul later admitted that “all I can do is recommend the prosecution. I can’t initiate prosecution.”
That legal uncertainty, though, didn’t stop Republicans from seizing on the moment to launch a fresh round of attacks. Following the hearing, Kennedy used his government X account to post a photo of Fauci, altered to include an image of the secretary behind him, holding handcuffs. On his personal account, he took the opportunity to tout his “best seller,” a book called “The Real Anthony Fauci,” published in 2021.
Fauci’s diaries indicated that in early 2021, he was concerned that the book “will almost certainly be slanderous.” But he was advised by a lawyer not to engage with Kennedy, who was then, and still is, an ardent critic of the safety of Covid-19 vaccines.
Fauci wrote in April 2021 that the lawyer “was adamant that we should do nothing about this since Bobby Kennedy has absolutely no credibility over the past several years.”
CNN’s Alison Main and Logan Schiano contributed to this report.
This story and headline have been updated with additional information.
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