Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., is questioning whether Dr. Anthony Fauci legally could invoke the Fifth Amendment during a congressional hearing after receiving a presidential pardon from former President Joe Biden, and he is preparing to push for a contempt of Congress vote against the former top infectious disease official.
Speaking on Fox News’s «The Will Cain Show,» Paul said the Fifth Amendment protects against self-incrimination, but a pardon grants immunity from prosecution, making the amendment inapplicable. «If you’ve already been given immunity, you can’t self-incriminate unless you lie,» Paul said. «I don’t know how you plead the Fifth Amendment to something you’ve already been granted immunity for.» Paul, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, intends to file a legal brief arguing that the pardon renders Fauci’s Fifth Amendment plea invalid and that the issue should be settled in court.
Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, pleaded the Fifth Amendment 111 times during a heated hearing Wednesday, refusing to answer questions about his role in the COVID-19 pandemic response and his funding of gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Biden pardoned Fauci in January 2025, citing concerns about «unjustified and politically motivated prosecutions» by the incoming Trump administration. Paul, however, has referred Fauci for prosecution to both the Biden and Trump Justice Departments and said the pardon does not erase the need for accountability.
The senator’s latest push follows his release of more than 1,000 pages of Fauci’s personal diary entries from 2019 through 2022. The journals reveal Fauci’s apparent obsession with his newfound fame during the pandemic, with entries describing himself as «the most famous and talked about person in the country.» They also show a discrepancy between Fauci’s private statements and his public remarks about the origins of COVID-19. According to Paul, in January 2020 Fauci privately acknowledged that the earliest cases did not come from a wet market, but he later publicly insisted for years that the virus originated there, which supported a natural origin theory and downplayed the possibility of a laboratory leak — a theory that Paul says Fauci bears responsibility for because he helped fund the Wuhan lab.
At the hearing, Paul accused Fauci and the National Institutes of Health of misleading Congress and destroying records, actions he said fractured public trust in the government’s handling of the pandemic that killed more than 1 million Americans. «They don’t seem to care about the truth,» Paul said of his Democratic colleagues on the committee, whom he criticized for not pressing Fauci harder. «I think they want to defend the government more than they want to get to the truth of: Did your government actually fund something that led to a pandemic that killed a million Americans?»
Beyond Capitol Hill, the fallout from Fauci’s testimony has resonated with groups that opposed pandemic restrictions. Tina Descovich, co-founder of Moms for Liberty, told Fox News Digital that Fauci’s silence leaves millions of parents still seeking answers about prolonged school closures, forced masking, and vaccine mandates for children. «The things our children have suffered — with the lack of education, with the forced masking, with children in some places being forced to take vaccinations so that they could go to school — America deserves an apology,» Descovich said. She noted that families are still grappling with learning loss, mental health challenges, and the effects of school closures that lasted up to two years in some places like California and Chicago. Descovich urged Congress to continue investigating how decisions were made and who was responsible for keeping schools closed.
Paul expressed disappointment that Fauci did not apologize or offer any answers during the hearing. He said he expects the legal question of whether a pardon nullifies the Fifth Amendment to be resolved by the courts, and he is determined to hold Fauci accountable for what he called a failure of transparency and a betrayal of public trust.
