Anthony Fauci sat before the United States Senate and pled the Fifth 111 times.
His private diary told a very different story than the one he spent years selling to the American public.
And now a House Republican has a bill that would make sure someone who stonewalls Congress like that never draws a federal paycheck again.
What Happened at the Hearing
Fauci appeared before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, chaired by Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), where he invoked the Fifth Amendment over 100 times.
After a brief opening statement, Fauci pleaded the Fifth 111 times over the course of the three-hour hearing.
That’s three hours of silence from a man who once held more power over American daily life than almost any unelected official in modern history. Schools closed. Bars shut down. Families separated. And the man who helped engineer all of it sat in a Senate chamber and refused to answer a single substantive question.
Fauci said in his opening statement that he would refrain from answering questions under the advice of his attorneys. “It pains me to do so because of the respect that I have for the legislative branch of government and my decades-long record of cooperating with Congress,” he said.
Respect for the legislative branch. That’s rich.
At the hearing, Senator Paul accused Fauci and the National Institutes of Health of misleading Congress and destroying records, which he said fractured the public’s trust over the nation’s handling of COVID-19.
Senator Paul announced he would seek contempt charges against Fauci after the hearing. “We’re going to have a vote next week on contempt. I think there’s another legal question that the courts may have to decide upon,” Paul said. “And that is whether or not a presidential pardon offers you complete immunity.”
The Diary That Blew Up Fauci’s Story
The hearing didn’t happen in a vacuum. Days before Fauci showed up to say nothing, a bombshell landed that made his silence look even more calculated.
Health officials located Fauci’s diary entries across nearly a dozen different servers. “It took us about eight months to dig these out of 11 separate servers, where they had been sequestered and secreted,” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr said during an appearance on Fox News.
After obtaining the private entries, HHS officials handed over the documents to Senators Rand Paul (R-KY) and Ron Johnson (R-WI).
The release of the 1,141-page document came ahead of Fauci’s appearance before the Senate committee.
And what those pages contained directly contradicted years of public denials.
In a March 15, 2020, entry in the diary, which begins with “BIG DAY!” written in red letters, Fauci recalled a conversation he had with then-New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. “I spoke with Bill de Blasio (Mayor — NYC) and convinced him based on what I was saying publicly and my conversation tonight to close the NYC schools (he had already decided based on what I was saying on TV),” Fauci revealed in his private notes.
The same entry continued: “I had a similar call with Ann O’Leary, the [Chief of Staff] of Gov. Gavin Newsom of California,” and noted that “based on my TV appearances today and yesterday, the Governor has decided to close the schools in California as well as the bars and restaurants.”
But in a 2022 interview, Fauci told a completely different story. He repeated that denial, saying, “They always come back and say, ‘Fauci was responsible for shutting schools down.’ I had nothing to do [with it]!”
Kennedy put it plainly: “I think the starkest impression that you get from reading these diaries is this massive dichotomy between what he was saying privately and what he was simultaneously saying publicly.”
Millions of kids lost a year or more of school. Parents lost jobs trying to cover childcare. Small businesses that had survived for decades closed permanently. And the man who told officials to pull the trigger on all of it spent years telling the public he had nothing to do with any of it.
The STOP the SWAMP Act and the Cash Prize Scandal
Republicans have been hammering the former public health official over the move, and now a new bill by Representative Rich McCormick (R-GA) would bar him from returning to his old duties and potentially open him to criminal prosecution.
The bill, called the STOP the SWAMP Act, would bar people from working for the federal government if they refuse to answer certain questions from federal lawmakers or if they are convicted of perjury, according to a news release on McCormick’s website.
McCormick put it in terms anyone can understand.
“We saw him evade so many questions, pleading the Fifth… that’s fine, that’s your constitutional right,” McCormick said. “But you also have the right, if your till comes up short at Burger King, when your boss asks you why are you short $20 in your cash register — if you plead the Fifth, that’s your… ability, but I can fire you.” He argued, “It should be the same way in government. If you don’t want to answer questions about what you did wrong, we should be able to fire you.”
The bill would also authorize members of Congress to refer hearing witnesses for prosecution if they were found to have unlawfully withheld information from lawmakers.
And McCormick wasn’t the only one moving legislation after the hearing.
Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) cited public records showing that Fauci, while director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, used employees to solicit at least eight cash awards for himself, with one award check alone totaling $900,000.
Hawley’s bill, dubbed the No Cash Prizes for Bureaucrats Act, would close those loopholes.
Hawley told Fox News Digital in a statement: “Fauci got rich while millions of people died. It can never happen again.” During the hearing, Hawley read from an email: “We’re working on this nomination for the Dan David Award for Fauci. We need to beef up the COVID part.” Hawley said the Dan David Award carried a $900,000 cash prize and claimed Fauci used federal employees to help obtain it.
He further accused Fauci of using government staff and resources to pursue at least eight additional cash awards, including honors from the Partnership for Public Service, the Adelson Prize, the Smithsonian Institution, the National Academy of Medicine, and the CDC Foundation.
During the pandemic, Americans were told to sacrifice. Businesses were told to close. People were told they couldn’t visit dying relatives in hospitals. And meanwhile, federal employees were apparently spending their taxpayer-funded work hours filling out award nominations so their boss could pocket another check.
The Pardon Question Nobody Can Quite Answer
Joe Biden pardoned Fauci along with other individuals on the last full day of his term. That pardon essentially immunizes Fauci for any offenses “arising from or in any manner related to” his government work between 2014 and January 19, 2025, Biden’s last full day in office.
But Republicans on the committee raised a pointed legal question: if you’ve already been pardoned, what exactly are you protecting yourself from?
Senator Hawley told Fauci directly: “You don’t have any rights under the Fifth Amendment because you’ve been pardoned. You know that. Your lawyer is sitting behind you now, shifting nervously in their chairs. They know it. This isn’t about the Constitution. This isn’t about the law. This is about contempt, contempt for this body and contempt for the American people.”
Paul said after the hearing: “We believe that with his immunity from criminal liability, that he didn’t need to hide behind the Fifth Amendment and that maybe the Fifth Amendment doesn’t attach when you have a pardon in place.”
Fauci is not currently facing any criminal charges and has consistently denied any wrongdoing. His attorney pushed back hard on Paul’s contempt push. “We are completely confident that Dr. Fauci has a valid Fifth Amendment privilege here and is on solid legal ground in asserting it,” his attorney said. “Rand Paul may be a doctor, but he is not a lawyer.”
The courts may ultimately have to sort out whether a presidential pardon broad enough to cover a decade of government work also strips away the constitutional right to stay silent. That’s genuinely unsettled legal territory. But the political reality is simpler: a man who told the country he had nothing to do with lockdowns kept a diary documenting exactly how he pushed those lockdowns, and now he’s refusing to discuss any of it under oath.
Whatever the courts decide, the American people already have a pretty clear picture.
The STOP the SWAMP Act may or may not pass. The contempt vote will happen or it won’t. But the diary is already public. The entries that contradict five years of carefully managed public statements aren’t going anywhere. And the question of whether Anthony Fauci will ever face real accountability for what happened to this country during the pandemic years is one that millions of Americans are watching very closely.
Congress has the power to make sure that anyone who stonewalls a legitimate oversight hearing never works for the federal government again. That’s not a radical idea. It’s the same standard any private employer would apply to an employee who refused to explain a missing $20 from the register.
The only difference is that the stakes here were a lot higher than $20.
Sources: Fox News, The Epoch Times, The Hill, Newsweek, Daily Signal, Josh Hawley Senate website, Rand Paul Senate website, PBS NewsHour, ABC News, NBC News