The man who fronted America’s Covid response remains silent, days after 1,100 pages of his private diary were released
Dr Anthony Fauci refused to testify at a US Senate hearing today, invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination for the first time in his career. The 85-year-old has appeared before Congress more than 250 times.
Fauci, who led America’s Covid-19 response and retired as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in December 2022, was subpoenaed by Senator Rand Paul, the Republican chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee.
In his opening statement, Fauci accused Paul of an ‘obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution’. He said the senator’s ‘sole reason’ for the hearing was ’to get me to say something, anything’ that would put him ‘behind bars’.
Republicans pressed on regardless
Republican senators continued questioning Fauci despite his refusal to answer. He repeatedly invoked the Fifth in response.
‘Let the record record that the witness has refused to answer whether there’s a folder in front of him based on his Fifth Amendment right’, Paul said at one point.
In the most dramatic moment of the session, Paul had Fauci’s lawyer escorted out after the attorney repeatedly tried to interject. The lawyer had said in a written statement that the circumstances made Fauci’s ‘continued cooperation (with Congress) impossible’.
The diary, the pardon, and the perjury trap
Days before the hearing, Paul released 1,100 pages of Fauci’s personal diary, covering late 2019 to his retirement. Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr said on Fox News on Monday that he handed the files to Paul after an eight-month search.
Kennedy made the strategy plain. ‘There are many things that (Fauci) said that we know are lies’, he told Fox News. ‘If he lies again, then he could be subject to perjury prosecution.’
That is the key to the hearing. President Joe Biden preemptively pardoned Fauci in his final days in office, shielding him from federal charges over past statements. But the pardon does not cover anything said after it was issued.
‘A pardon that protects a person from criminal prosecution doesn’t rewrite history’, Paul said. ‘It does not convert a misleading statement to a truthful one, and it does not prevent Congress from establishing what happened.’
Democrats on the committee called the session a trap and a distraction. Senator Maggie Hassan told Fauci the hearing was ‘designed to entrap’ him. Senator Gary Peters said it ’looks backwards’ instead of addressing current national security threats.
The dispute at the heart of it all
The row centres on whether the National Institutes of Health funded gain-of-function research, which makes viruses more contagious or dangerous, at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Fauci told a Senate committee in May 2021 that the NIH ‘categorically has not funded gain-of-function research to be conducted in the Wuhan Institute’. Paul disputes this.
A pardon that protects a person from criminal prosecution doesn’t rewrite history. It does not convert a misleading statement to a truthful one.
Federal reviews of the pandemic’s origin remain inconclusive. CNN’s report stated that there is ’no evidence the virus was engineered and leaked from a virology lab’, but that overstates the consensus. The FBI and the US Department of Energy have both assessed a laboratory incident as the likely origin, while other agencies favour natural spillover or reached no conclusion.
The NIH and NIAID are US federal agencies funded by congressional appropriations, with budgets running to tens of billions of dollars a year.
Fauci is not the only Trump-era target facing this route. A House Republican last week referred former special counsel Jack Smith to the Justice Department over alleged false statements in his own committee testimony.
The hearing ended with no new answers on Covid’s origins. No perjury charges have been filed. Republicans say they will continue their oversight using the diary and Fauci’s previous sworn testimony.
