Fauci Pleads the Fifth Over 100 Times at Senate Hearing, Faces Possible Contempt Vote Aug. 5

Dr. Anthony Fauci sat before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Wednesday and pleaded the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times, according to Colorado Politics. He answered almost nothing.

The hearing, run by Chairman Rand Paul (R-KY), was supposed to be Fauci's chance to respond to years of accusations that he misled Congress about the origins of COVID-19 and NIH funding for gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Instead, Fauci's attorney advised him to say almost nothing at all, according to Newsweek.

Paul didn't hide his frustration. "It's against the law to obstruct an investigation of Congress," he told Fauci directly, warning of "repercussions" for his refusal to testify, according to Colorado Politics. Paul has scheduled a committee vote for Aug. 5 on a resolution to hold Fauci in contempt.

The Pardon Fight

Former President Joe Biden issued Fauci a sweeping preemptive pardon in January 2025, before leaving office, covering any federal offense connected to his government service between Jan. 1, 2014, and Jan. 20, 2025. According to the Daily Wire, the pardon named no specific crime, no incident, and no allegation. It simply immunized Fauci from whatever he "may have committed" during that 11-year window.

That sweeping scope is exactly what Republicans are now using against him. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) told Fauci directly at the hearing that he has "no rights under the Fifth Amendment" because he's already been pardoned, citing the Supreme Court's 1896 ruling in Brown v. Walker, which held that a witness generally can't invoke the privilege for an offense they can no longer be prosecuted for, according to Colorado Politics.

If Fauci truly cannot be charged for anything he did in that window, the question becomes what exactly he is protecting himself from by staying silent.

But legal experts pushed back on that reading. Former federal prosecutor Neama Rahmani told the Washington Examiner, as reported by Colorado Politics, that Fauci "played it perfectly" from a legal standpoint. The pardon is retroactive, Rahmani said, and doesn't cover perjury or false statements Fauci might make during Wednesday's actual testimony. "It's not a license to commit crimes," he said. "Biden's pardon doesn't apply to future conduct."

Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at the conservative Advancing American Freedom, agreed with that distinction. "If he lies to the committee now about something that he said back then, he's not being prosecuted for what he said back then," von Spakovsky told the Washington Examiner. "He's being prosecuted for lying to the committee now."

Von Spakovsky added that a presidential pardon only covers federal offenses. It cannot stop a state from prosecuting the same underlying conduct if it also violated state law and the statute of limitations there hasn't run out, according to Colorado Politics.

What Fauci and His Lawyers Are Saying

Fauci's attorney, David Schertler, told CBS News that his client is on "solid legal ground" asserting the Fifth Amendment, adding pointedly, "Rand Paul may be a doctor, but he is not a lawyer."

Schertler called Paul's push for contempt part of an "obsessive and groundless vendetta" and said the circumstances of the hearing made Fauci's continued cooperation "impossible," leaving the Fifth Amendment as the only option his lawyers would sanction, according to Newsweek. Schertler also invoked the Supreme Court's description of the Fifth Amendment's purpose: to protect the innocent as much as the guilty.

Fauci himself used his opening statement to accuse Paul of running the hearing to fulfill a personal vendetta rather than conduct legitimate oversight, according to Newsweek.

The underlying dispute traces back to Fauci's May 2021 sworn testimony, when he told Paul that "NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology." A 2023 Government Accountability Office review found NIH funding did support research splicing bat coronaviruses with SARS and MERS strains, and in 2024 an NIH principal deputy director acknowledged to Congress that the U.S. government had funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan, according to the Daily Wire. A 2020 email from Fauci himself, released as part of his diary records, shows he was aware that Wuhan researchers were working on gain-of-function experiments months before his denial.

The statute of limitations on charging Fauci for that 2021 testimony expired May 11, 2026, according to the Daily Wire, and the Trump Justice Department did not bring a case before that deadline.

What's Unresolved

Whether Fauci's Fifth Amendment assertions will actually hold up is now a live legal question, not a settled one. Eugene Volokh of UCLA and the Hoover Institution has written that the privilege disappears only when there's no realistic prospect of prosecution by any federal or state government, according to Colorado Politics. This means state-level exposure alone could justify Fauci's silence even under a full federal pardon.

The committee vote on contempt is scheduled for Aug. 5. If it passes, the matter would likely move toward a court fight over enforcement, since contempt of Congress citations typically require Justice Department action or civil litigation to have teeth. No court has yet ruled on whether Fauci's specific pardon strips his Fifth Amendment rights, and no perjury or contempt charge has been filed against him.