What we're watching
• Happening now: The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee is meeting to hold a vote today on whether to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci, who guided the US Covid-19 pandemic response, in contempt of Congress.
• Last week’s hearing: The vote comes after Fauci, who served as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases during the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, invoked the Fifth Amendment over 100 times during a committee hearing last week. “There will be repercussions for your refusal to testify,” warned Committee Chair Sen. Rand Paul, who has long sought to blame the pandemic and shortcomings of the US response on Fauci.
• What could happen next: A vote to hold Fauci in contempt could initiate a process that would result in the Justice Department considering whether to charge him with a crime.
The committee has convened ahead of contempt vote
The Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee has convened ahead of its vote to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress.
The panel’s Chairman Sen. Rand Paul, and the top Democrat, Sen. Gary Peters, are expected to deliver opening remarks before the vote.
Why Fauci opted to invoke the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times last week
Dr. Anthony Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times during last week’s hearing on his Covid-era actions — and to hear him tell it, he had good reason for doing so.
The former government scientist opted not to answer lawmakers’ questions after Republicans openly acknowledged that the hearing was aimed at getting Fauci to perjure himself in his testimony.
Fauci received a pre-emptive pardon from former President Joe Biden for all of his actions from 2014 through January 2025. But if he testified, Fauci and his team worried, Republicans could seize on any small inconsistency to bring new charges accusing him of lying to Congress.
“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,’” Fauci said of committee chair Sen. Rand Paul during his opening statement last week.
“Therefore, although it pains me to do so because of the respect that I have for the legislative branch of government and my decadeslong record of cooperating with Congress, under the advice of my attorneys, I will invoke my right under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution to refrain from answering your questions,” he said.
Why Republicans are holding a contempt vote today — and why Fauci might not be safe
Dr. Anthony Fauci received a very broad pardon from President Joe Biden that covered virtually anything related to his government service between January 2014 and January 2025.
In other words, Fauci is already immune from prosecution for many of the potential alleged crimes Sen. Rand Paul and the committee’s Republicans could try to link him to from the Covid era.
But whether it was enough for Fauci to plead the Fifth and be done with it is a major unanswered question.
There is a tension between Fifth Amendment protections and Congress’ investigative authority. And witnesses who claim they are protected from answering questions can be called upon to justify that in court and can be held in contempt.
In announcing his plans to schedule a contempt vote for Fauci last week, Paul said: “It’s against the law to obstruct an investigation of Congress. There will be repercussions for your refusal to testify.”
Senate subcommittee obtains Fauci’s phone ahead of contempt vote
A Senate subcommittee investigating Dr. Anthony Fauci has obtained a copy of his iPhone, a spokesperson for the panel’s chair, GOP Sen. Ron Johnson, told CNN on Wednesday.
The Department of Health and Human Services provided the phone to Johnson’s panel, the Senate Homeland Security Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, ahead of the planned vote to hold the retired scientist in contempt of Congress.
Johnson’s possession of a copy of the phone – which Fauci used during his time as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases – could boost congressional Republicans’ efforts to probe and potentially attack Fauci and his actions during the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Hopefully, this device will address many of the questions he refused to answer at last week’s hearing,” Johnson wrote on social media Wednesday night.
CNN has reached out to a spokesperson for Fauci for comment.
Inside Fauci's strategy at his Senate hearing last week
Dr. Anthony Fauci arrived at a high-stakes Senate hearing last week with a single, modest goal: Survive. The former top government scientist felt he accomplished that mission, people close to Fauci told CNN.
Invoking his Fifth Amendment right to not self-incriminate more than 100 times, Fauci gave Senate Republicans a myriad of clips to share on X, but deprived them of any new opportunity to fulfill their vows to prosecute him for perjury. He refused to be drawn back into long-running battles over Covid-19 and its origins.
“There was no other option,” one of the people close to Fauci said. “Rand Paul has millions of documents that he could bring up over a 50-year career. (Fauci) has nothing in front of him.”
But in a sign that Fauci’s team anticipated Republicans would seek to challenge his Fifth Amendment rights, the scientists’ opening statement underwent multiple revisions to ensure he did not address his Covid-era actions in a way that would inadvertently undermine his claim against self-incrimination, one of the people familiar said.
Fauci instead used his opening statement solely to decry the hearing itself, accusing Paul of having an “unhinged obsession” with imprisoning him. And the scientist’s team purposely did not telegraph their plans to invoke the Fifth Amendment ahead of time, that person said, forcing Republicans to plan for all scenarios.
How did Dr. Anthony Fauci get here?
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 last 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.”
Committee chairman Sen. Rand Paul’s vote on holding Fauci in contempt of Congress for invoking that right extends a years-long investigation aimed at validating his and other Republicans’ belief that Fauci orchestrated a cover-up of the origins of the coronavirus.
The vote could initiate a process that would result in the Justice Department considering whether to charge Fauci with a crime.
Senate committee will vote on whether to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress
The Senate Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs will hold a vote today on whether to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci, who oversaw the US response to the Covid-19 pandemic, in contempt of Congress.
Sen. Rand Paul, the committee chair, announced plans to hold the contempt vote last week, after Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment over 100 times during a committee hearing that Republican critics had publicly hoped would open the retired scientist up to charges of perjury.
Fauci, who for decades led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, had never before over the course of hundreds of appearances on the Hill invoked the right previously.
Ahead of the hearing, the committee released more than 1,100 pages of Fauci’s personal diary from 2019 to 2022. Fauci, in his opening statement before the committee last week, pointed to this and comments from Paul and other Republicans as his reason for refusing to answer questions.
