Dr. Anthony Fauci on July 29 declined to answer questions from senators following the release of a diary he compiled while working in government.
“Although it pains me to do so, because of the respect I have for the Legislative Branch for government, and my decades-long 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,” Fauci, 85, who led the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) from 1984 to 2022, said in his opening statement during a hearing in Washington.
Fauci repeated more than 100 times in response to questions that he would not answer them, pursuant to the Fifth Amendment.
Federal law makes it a crime for a person who is subpoenaed by Congress to “refuse to answer any question pertinent to the question under inquiry” and to, in certain situations, withhold information from Congress. Fauci, who was appearing pursuant to a subpoena issued by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, could face misdemeanor or felony charges.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), the chairman of the committee, told reporters after the hearing that the committee would next week vote on whether to recommend charges against Fauci for contempt of Congress.
“We believe that with his liability, 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 said.
Paul said the subpoena was valid and that the questions were pertinent to Fauci’s decision-making as head of the NIAID as well as chief adviser to the president.
David Schertler, an attorney representing Fauci, was removed from the hearing for trying to speak to senators. Schertler did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In one entry in March 2020, Fauci recounted a conversation with then-New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, writing that he “convinced him based on what I was saying publicly and my conversation tonight to close the NYC schools.”
Then he said he spoke with the chief of staff for California Gov. Gavin Newsom. The chief of staff “said 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,” he said.
Fauci also outlined a call he held with scientists shortly after COVID-19 was detected in Wuhan, China, writing that nine of 11 of the scientists said that it was possible humans inserted a feature of the virus called the furin cleavage site. A research proposal later made public went over experiments that would insert a furin cleavage site into a bat coronavirus, with work potentially taking place in China.
“This was either an extraordinary coincidence, or a smoking gun,” Paul said on Wednesday.
Fauci repeatedly said in public that COVID-19 likely came from nature, not from a lab, and said his agency never funded a class of risky experiments called gain-of-function.
President Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social on Wednesday that from the beginning, he said COVID-19 came from a lab in Wuhan.
“Fauci strongly disagreed, always trying to protect China,” he wrote.
“Your primary concern was hiding the fact that you approved funding for this dangerous research,” Paul said.
Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), the top Democrat on the panel, said that Paul’s investigation into the origins of COVID-19 was aimed at reaching a predetermined conclusion and was biased.
He also said that the government needs to work to improve efforts to prepare for future health crises and should conduct oversight on actions taken by the Trump administration on vaccines and other health issues.
“I could go on, on all the topics that we need to be looking at moving forward to protect this country,” Peters said. “We’re not doing that in this committee. That’s what this committee was designed to do; that’s what it has done throughout history. We should get back to that.”
