Anthony Fauci spent decades as one of the most powerful unelected men in Washington, DC.
He pushed lockdowns, championed mandates, and stonewalled anyone who dared question whether American taxpayer dollars funded dangerous research in a Chinese lab.
Now Senator Rand Paul just made a move that could put Fauci’s fate in the hands of the Justice Department.
The Committee Vote That Shook Washington
The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee voted in a party-line 8-5 vote, with two additional “no” votes by proxy, to approve a resolution holding Fauci in contempt of Congress following his hearing last week, during which he invoked his Fifth Amendment rights 111 times and refused to answer a single question posed to him by the panel centered on the COVID-19 pandemic.
While the next step would typically be a vote on the Senate floor, Senator Paul told CBS News he intends to send the contempt resolution directly to the Justice Department as a referral — and a congressional aide confirmed later that same day the referral had already been sent.
That is not a small thing. Trump associates Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon were held in contempt of Congress and jailed as a consequence. Fauci’s team has spent years insisting he is untouchable. That argument just got a lot harder to make.
In remarks just before the contempt vote, Paul said the committee was strictly responding to Fauci’s refusal to testify, rather than his decisions during the pandemic. “The chair directed Anthony Fauci to answer. He refused. That is what we are voting on today. Not his opinions. Not his policies. Not anything he said from the podium six years ago. We are voting on whether a witness who has received the benefit of a federal pardon can be ordered by this committee to answer questions and then defy that order without consequence,” Paul said.
Paul put the number plainly: “The witness had many chances to answer the questions pertinent to our investigation, and he made his decision 111 times.”
The Pardon That May Have Backfired
Here is the legal wrinkle that makes this whole situation more interesting than the usual Washington contempt theater.
Fauci was pardoned by former President Joe Biden in January 2025 after Biden said the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases could potentially face “unjustified and politically motivated prosecutions” by the incoming Trump administration.
But Paul’s argument is that the pardon actually eliminated any legitimate basis for pleading the Fifth in the first place. “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,” Paul told reporters after the original hearing.
Paul stated that Fauci “was subpoenaed here to testify, refused to answer any questions even after being directed by the chair and being advised of the law requiring him to do so,” and that Fauci “cited a privilege that is unsupported because of his blanket pardon and because he waived the privilege by testifying at the start.”
The 2025 pardon would not protect Fauci from any prosecution stemming from conduct after that date, including any remarks made during present-day congressional testimony. That is the opening Paul is pushing through.
Fauci’s legal team fired back. David Schertler, legal counsel for Fauci, called the contempt vote “a crude political stunt intended to punish Dr. Fauci for exercising his constitutional rights” and said “the Senate should reject Senator Paul’s meritless and politically-motivated contempt resolution.”
Schertler also said, “Today’s resolution is a continuation of Senator Paul’s personal vendetta against Dr. Fauci, who spent 50 years in public health and has saved countless lives.”
That is a familiar line. Fauci’s defenders have used it for years. The question is whether it still works when the man himself refuses to answer 111 questions under oath.
What the Diaries Revealed — and Why Fauci Went Silent
The contempt vote did not happen in a vacuum. Senator Paul released more than 1,000 pages of diary entries he says were written by Fauci between 2019 and 2022, which Paul claims shows what Fauci “wrote privately and what he told the country are two different stories.”
According to Paul’s office, Fauci’s personal diary reveals that as early as January 31, 2020, he was told by top virologists that the virus’s furin cleavage site raised real doubts about a natural origin, with about half the scientists on that initial call believing it looked “constructed.” Despite this early private uncertainty, Fauci spent the following years publicly and confidently dismissing the lab leak theory while insisting the science was settled.
The diary also documents his private frustration and defensiveness over gain-of-function funding questions tied to EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, even as he told Congress under oath that no such research had occurred.
And Paul has pressed a specific question for years. Paul has accused Fauci of lying to Congress about the issue of “gain of function” lab research on viruses, which makes them more dangerous to better understand them, and whether funding from the National Institutes of Health ultimately made its way to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.
The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which Paul chairs, subpoenaed Fauci on July 22 to testify as part of its investigation into risky life sciences research and the true origins of the virus that upended the world in 2020.
Fauci showed up. And then he said nothing. He invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination 111 times. It didn’t matter if it was about the origins of COVID-19 or what day of the week it was; Fauci’s answer was the same: “On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution.”
Democrats on the committee tried every procedural move available to them. Democratic members of the committee, including Senators Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, brought up numerous motions to table the resolution, all of which were voted down by the Republican majority.
Senator Gary Peters of Michigan, the top Democrat on the committee, wrote that “a federal pardon does not eliminate an individual’s Fifth Amendment protection if they still face a ‘real and appreciable’ risk of federal or state prosecution.” Peters called the process “rushed” and warned it could harm the committee’s future oversight work.
What Happens Now
The referral is sitting at the Justice Department. A contempt resolution would normally head to the full Senate, where it would require 60 votes — and it is unlikely the Fauci resolution would receive enough support there to pass. Paul knows that. That is exactly why he bypassed the floor vote entirely.
Whether Attorney General Pam Bondi moves on the referral remains to be seen. But the political pressure is now real in a way it was not before.
Consider what the American people watched during the COVID years. Lockdowns that shuttered small businesses and kept kids out of school for months. Mask mandates that came with shifting justifications. Vaccine mandates that cost workers their jobs and servicemembers their careers. And through all of it, Fauci stood at the podium as the face of a public health apparatus that told Americans the science was settled while, according to his own private diary, he was privately entertaining doubts about the very things he was publicly dismissing.
The MAHA movement exists in large part because millions of Americans watched all of that unfold and concluded they had been lied to. They were not conspiracy theorists. They were paying attention.
And now the man at the center of it all has sat before a Senate committee under subpoena and refused to answer a single question. Not one. One hundred and eleven times, he hid behind a constitutional protection that Senator Paul argues the Biden pardon already stripped away.
The irony is hard to miss. Joe Biden issued that sweeping preemptive pardon specifically to protect Fauci from accountability. Paul’s argument is that the pardon itself may have removed the only legal shield Fauci had left.
Whether the Justice Department acts or not, this much is clear: the stonewalling has a cost. The contempt vote now likely sets up a legal battle over the limits of Fauci’s Fifth Amendment rights. That fight will play out in public, and every round of it will remind Americans what Fauci refused to answer.
That is not nothing. That is, in fact, exactly the kind of accountability the American people were promised when they sent a new Senate majority to Washington, DC.
Sources: Breitbart, CBS News, Fox News, The Hill, NBC News, NPR, PBS NewsHour, PJ Media, Senator Rand Paul’s official website (paul.senate.gov)