With newly declassified documents showing Anthony Fauci withheld information from Congress and the public during the COVID-19 pandemic, Republicans interrogated the former chief medical advisor in a congressional hearing Wednesday.
Fauci, who received a preemptive pardon from former President Joe Biden, repeatedly pled the Fifth during the heated Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing.
He refused to explain the discrepancies between his private communications and public statements regarding the pandemic when he served as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Fauci declined to even answer Sen. Josh Hawley’s questions about the color of his tie or the day of the week, responding “On the advice of counsel, I respectfully declined to answer based upon my rights under the 5th Amendment to the Constitution.”
“Let’s just get one thing straight: you don’t have any rights under the 5th Amendment, because you’ve been pardoned,” Hawley rebutted, citing the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Walker.
The 1896 case held that “if the witness has already received a pardon, he cannot longer set up his privildge [against self-incrimination], since he stands, with respect to such offence as if it had never been committed.”
“This isn’t about the law. This is about contempt; contempt for this body and contempt for the American people. But I think I know why you’re doing it,” Hawley said. “It’s because during the pandemic, you got rich, didn’t you? You got rich while people were dying, hundreds of thousands of Americans, over a million in the end, and you were getting rich.”
Hawley exhibited personal emails from Fauci’s staff in 2020, showing that Fauci directed federal employees while the pandemic was still raging to apply for and solicit over $1 million from at least eight cash prizes – for himself.
The federal employees involved included Fauci’s chief of staff Greg Folkers and Fauci’s personal assistant Patricia Conrad, as well as Lawrence Tabak, Holli Jaffe, Courtney Billet, Louis Miller, Katherine Miller, and Hugh Auchincloss .
“[Y]ou turned your staff into a full time application machine,” Hawley said. “You actually wrote to people and said, ‘do you think maybe I’d qualify?’ … You then had them go out to the ethics agencies and ethics watchdogs and demand that you be able to get the money. That’s right, we’ve got it in your emails.”
Federal law expressly prohibits using federal resources, including employees and time, to solicit cash awards or other personal benefits for federal employees.
“A million people dead, and you’re getting rich. A million people dead, you’re using federal employees to get cash awards for you. A million people dead, and you’re here taking the 5th because you don’t want to admit that what really happened in all that time was a multi-year course of self dealing,” Hawley said. “Isn’t that true Dr. Fauci?”
“On the advice of counsel, I respectfully declined to answer based upon my rights under the 5th Amendment to the Constitution,” Fauci replied.
“You may have been a good public servant at one time, I don’t know. But I can tell you from reading your emails now, from looking at what you did, how you used your employees, somewhere along the line it became all about you,” Hawley told the doctor. “You became a narcissist and a megalomaniac and a liar. And you’ve lied to the American people and you’ve lied to this body.”
Hawley and other Republicans had already accused Fauci years ago of covering up the true origins of the virus. A National Institutes of Health official revealed in 2024 that U.S. taxpayer dollars funded what some would term “gain of function” research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in the area where the virus was first discovered.
The admission contradicted Fauci’s assertion to Congress in 2021, under oath, that the “NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” a statement Republicans considered intentionally misleading.
Other Republican senators during the hearing lambasted Fauci for his entire approach to combatting the pandemic.
They argued that Fauci’s promotion of widespread lockdowns, COVID-19 vaccination for pregnant women, and strict mask mandates, coupled with his public ridicule of the theory that the virus originated from a lab, permanently damaged public trust in institutions.
“The haphazard information you released and pushed on the American people with little research is appalling, and why there’s so much distrust in our institutions today,” Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., told Fauci.
“That trust is crucial to public health, and you, more than any person or event in my lifetime, have destroyed that trust for millions of Americans,” he added. “You destroyed the federal government’s credibility when it comes to public health. We have entire generations of Americans who – rightfully so – do not trust our institution to keep people safe, because of you.”
After the hearing, committee Chairman Rand Paul, R-Ky., announced that the U.S. Senate will vote next week on holding Fauci in contempt of Congress for refusing to answer questions.
