Appearing before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee after being subpoenaed by Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, the panel's Republican chairman and one of Fauci's most persistent critics, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases declined to answer questions just minutes into the hearing, saying Paul had made clear his goal was to seek his prosecution.
"Although it pains me to do so because of the respect that I have for the legislative branch of government and my decades-long record of cooperating with Congress," Fauci said, "under the advice of my attorneys, I will invoke my right under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution to refrain from answering your questions."
The infectious disease expert has been a primary target of Republicans' continuing effort to revisit the government's response to the pandemic and the disputed origins of the coronavirus, issues that have remained central to conservative criticism of Fauci years after he left government service in 2022. Paul and other Republicans have long alleged that the National Institutes of Health funded so-called gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that contributed to the pandemic, an accusation Fauci has consistently denied. Fauci has maintained that, under the government's definition of gain-of-function research, NIH did not fund such work related to the virus that caused COVID. Federal reviews have not reached a definitive conclusion about the virus's origin, and there is no evidence it was engineered and leaked from a laboratory.
Ahead of Wednesday's hearing, Paul released roughly 1,100 pages from Fauci's pandemic-era diary, arguing the documents showed discrepancies between Fauci's private thinking and his public testimony.
At one point, Paul remarked, "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."
President Donald Trump likewise weighed in before the hearing, saying on Truth Social that Fauci "made too many bad calls" during the pandemic and asserting that he "didn't let (Fauci) shut the Country down." Trump has repeatedly criticized Fauci's recommendations on masks, shutdowns, and other public health measures.
Asked this week about concerns that the hearing was designed to lure Fauci into committing perjury, Paul dismissed the criticism. "There's no risk to perjury if you tell the truth," he told reporters. "The only thing he can't do is lie again."
Democrats criticized the hearing as a partisan exercise. Senator Gary Peters of Michigan, the committee's top Democrat, argued the panel should be focusing on current national security threats rather than revisiting disputes over the pandemic. "Instead of focusing on the national security challenges that we are facing in our country right now, today's hearing looks backwards," Peters said at the hearing. "Rather than building on that work to strengthen our preparedness against future disasters, we are instead relitigating the past."
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