Anthony Fauci has had a tough time lately.
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier revealed on Wednesday that he had issued a subpoena to the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, seeking documents "ranging to what he knew, when he knew it, his doubts about the safety and efficacy of vaccines that he's out there promoting."
The resolution was 'passed on behalf of the millions of Americans and their families still affected years after the COVID pandemic.'
Fauci's week was, however, fated to get a whole lot worse.
Despite strong Democratic opposition, the Senate Homeland Security Committee successfully voted on Thursday to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress.
The contempt resolution passed in a 8-5 vote along party lines, and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said he will now refer the resolution to the Justice Department for possible prosecution.
Paul noted that Fauci was knowingly provided a full and unconditional pardon in former President Joe Biden's name on Jan. 19, 2025, for any offenses against the U.S. he may have committed or taken part in between Jan. 1, 2014, and that date.
Despite apparently being unable to incriminate himself by answering lawmakers' questions last week, he declined to answer, citing the Fifth Amendment over 110 times.
The resolution noted that committee Chairman Paul "found the privilege of the Fifth Amendment unsupported as applied to questions pertaining to the period of the pardon and directed Dr. Fauci to answer," and "overruled the privilege of the Fifth Amendment asserted by Fauci," directing the former NIAID director to provide relevant testimony, warning him that he may otherwise be held in contempt.
RELATED: The Biden autopen scandal has one big winner: Anthony Fauci
Fauci may soon pay the price for ignoring Paul's warning.
Paul noted on X that the resolution was "passed on behalf of the millions of Americans and their families still affected years after the COVID pandemic."
A conviction for contempt of Congress can result in a $100,000 fine and prison sentence of up to one year.
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Anthony Fauci is probably going to skate. He should not. But nearly every institutional and political incentive now points toward that outcome.
Americans who watched Fauci invoke the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times before the Senate are understandably furious. They may also be headed for an epic letdown when the man they most want held accountable resumes his life in pompous peace.
Public frustration will rise when people realize that Fauci may leave Congress untouched after pleading the Fifth more than 100 times.
The first obstacle is the legal uncertainty surrounding Fauci’s autopenned pardon.
The pardon was signed by autopen, and substantial evidence raises questions about whether President Biden personally authorized it. A presidential pardon is an authority only the president may exercise.
In Fauci’s case, the written record includes an email from Biden chief of staff Jeff Zients on the final evening of the administration. Zients emailed: “I approve the use of the autopen for the execution of all of the following pardons.”
Biden later told the New York Times in an interview that he had approved broad categories of pardons rather than, in every instance, specific names.
That admission came from the same newspaper that had initially dismissed the Oversight Project’s autopen disclosures in an article headlined “How an Autopen Conspiracy Theory About Biden Went Viral.” Within months, the Times had moved from ridicule to damage control.
The basic facts are therefore established: Fauci’s pardon was executed by autopen, and serious questions remain about Biden’s awareness and authorization.
President Trump has called the autopen controversy the scandal of the century and declared the affected actions “VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT.” The Department of Justice, however, has behaved as though that declaration carries no legal consequence.
That gap between political assertion and prosecutorial action is decisive. Questioning a pardon’s validity in public is one thing. Charging someone whose defense rests on that pardon is another. So far, the Justice Department has shown no appetite for testing the issue in court.
Fauci’s Senate testimony exposed the contradiction at the center of his position. He repeatedly invoked the Fifth Amendment, arguing that Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) was trying to lure him into statements that could support a perjury referral.
RELATED: The Biden tapes blow open the autopen scandal
In his opening statement, Fauci said: “The only conclusion I can reach is that the sole reason he is calling me before this committee is to get me to say something — anything — that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, ‘behind bars.’”
A witness may invoke the Fifth Amendment when he genuinely believes his answers could expose him to criminal liability. The privilege is not a general escape hatch from politically uncomfortable questioning.
Fauci’s plausible claim of criminal exposure rests, at least in part, on the uncertainty surrounding his pardon. But relying on that uncertainty means conceding that the pardon may not be beyond challenge.
If Fauci insists the pardon is unquestionably valid and no prosecution is possible, he weakens the basis for invoking the Fifth. If he claims a real risk of prosecution, he implicitly acknowledges that the pardon may not protect him.
The same cloud that threatens the pardon also strengthens his Fifth Amendment claim.
That sounds like vulnerability. In practice, it may protect him.
There is still no sign that the Justice Department plans to prosecute Fauci or anyone else in a case designed to test an autopen action. The department has not challenged a single autopenned pardon or commutation.
Worse, the Trump administration continues releasing offenders whose sentences Biden shortened by autopen. The executive branch is carrying out the very orders the president has publicly described as nullities.
For the Oversight Project, that contradiction is more than theoretical. It’s incredibly frustrating. Putting violent felons back on the street is difficult to reconcile with the claim that autopenned acts are void.
Could Congress hold Fauci in contempt for invoking the Fifth rather than answering questions? Possibly. Probably not.
Fauci would likely show enough basis to argue that Paul sought a criminal referral and that the uncertainty surrounding his pardon created a genuine risk of prosecution.
Any challenge would probably be litigated in federal court in Washington, D.C., a venue far friendlier to Fauci than many others. That venue alone improves his odds.
The political barriers are even greater. There are almost certainly not enough votes in the Senate to pursue contempt, both because of uncertainty over whether Fauci’s conduct crossed the legal line and because senators fear accusations of political weaponization.
Getting 60 votes to overcome a filibuster is a fantasy. Even clearing Paul’s committee, divided 8-7, may prove difficult. Senator James Lankford (R-Okla.) has already expressed some sympathy for Fauci’s position.
Paul has suggested another path: If the committee approves contempt on Thursday, he could refer the matter directly to the Justice Department or pursue a civil action.
RELATED: Two Americas, under Fauci, with liberty and justice for none
Fauci would immediately argue that a committee cannot exercise the contempt power of the full Senate. He would contend that without a vote of the whole chamber, there is no valid contempt finding to enforce.
The courts are likely to agree. Which leaves the public exactly where it began.
Congress has little chance of imposing consequences. The only meaningful route runs through the Justice Department: charge Fauci, force litigation over the pardon, and finally test whether Biden lawfully authorized it.
That would require the department to abandon the passivity it has displayed so far.
Public frustration will rise when people realize that Fauci may leave Congress untouched after pleading the Fifth more than 100 times.
The useful response is not another round of televised outrage. It is sustained pressure on the Justice Department to treat autopenned actions the way Trump himself described them: null and void.
In “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” Oscar Wilde imagines a portrait that records the corruption its subject refuses to see in himself. Dorian hides the picture because its truth is unbearable. The concealment is physical, but the deeper act is spiritual: Self-deception protects him from self-knowledge.
Anthony Fauci’s Wednesday appearance before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs supplied a modern version of Wilde’s image. Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment 111 times.
The legal questions are serious. The philosophical question is more intimate: How does Fauci live with himself?
The constitutional privilege against self-incrimination is fundamental. The government bears the burden of proving guilt. A witness need not assist the prosecution by supplying evidence against himself, and a jury ordinarily may not treat a criminal defendant’s silence as proof of guilt.
But Fauci’s silence invites a question larger than criminal liability. What does a public official do when the legal right not to answer collides with the moral obligation to confront his own record?
Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas) have raised a narrower legal question. If President Biden’s pardon protects Fauci from prosecution for the conduct under examination, the basis for invoking the Fifth Amendment may be considerably weaker. Congress can also compel testimony after an appropriate grant of immunity. Those questions belong to lawyers and courts.
Cruz, meanwhile, accused Fauci of showing “contempt for Congress and contempt for the American people.” He argued that Fauci’s diaries reveal private doubts about the “wet market” explanation for COVID-19 and private satisfaction over persuading Democrat officials to keep schools closed while publicly distancing himself from those decisions. The consequences for millions of children, Cruz said, will last a lifetime.
Other controversies surrounding Fauci’s tenure at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases deepen the moral inquiry. NIAID funded research using human fetal tissue derived from elective abortions, including projects intended to create “humanized” mice for disease research. The Trump administration later restricted NIH scientists from acquiring new fetal tissue. One widely discussed study involved grafting fetal scalp tissue onto mice. The study appeared in Scientific Reports in 2020.
The legal questions are serious. The philosophical question is more intimate: How does Fauci live with himself?
The answer may be that he does so by dividing himself. There is the public Fauci, who speaks with certainty and moral authority, and the private Fauci, whose diaries preserve doubts, calculations, resentments, and self-justifications.
Self-deception tells a person that he has done nothing wrong. Self-justification supplies the explanation for everyone else. The first lie protects the conscience. The second protects the reputation.
“Taking the Fifth” can therefore become more than a legal act. The constitutional privilege is legitimate. The existential temptation it symbolizes is not: the desire to avoid the truth because the truth would collapse the identity one has built.
RELATED: ‘It’s past time’: Florida launches investigation into Fauci
A divided person does not merely conceal himself from others. Eventually, he loses the ability to recognize himself. Public statements serve one purpose, private reflections another, and the distance between them becomes a permanent feature of the soul.
Why keep a diary at all? Even teenagers know that diary locks are flimsy and private pages may someday be read. The impulse to record what one cannot say publicly suggests that self-deception never quite succeeds. A person may hide the portrait, but he still returns to the attic.
Fauci’s diary resembles a secular confessional. He did not confess to God or seek absolution from anyone beyond himself. He recorded his private account before the highest authority his worldview appears to recognize: Anthony Fauci.
That arrangement offers no forgiveness because it requires no repentance. The same man supplies the accusation, the defense, the verdict, and the pardon.
Wilde understood that self-deception cannot preserve the soul forever. The portrait keeps changing even when no one looks at it. The mind can suppress guilt, rename pride as duty, and call self-protection public service. But every evasion leaves another mark.
At some point, only two paths remain. One leads through truth, repentance, and the surrender of the false self. The other leads deeper into silence, because every answer threatens the structure of excuses holding the person together.
That is the existential Fifth: not the lawful refusal to incriminate oneself before the state, but the lifelong refusal to testify honestly before one’s own conscience.
Anthony Fauci spent years commanding Americans to “trust the science.” But when faced with real questions about his approach to the pandemic, the longtime public health bureaucrat had almost nothing to say.
The health “expert” accused Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) of having an “obsession” with calling for his prosecution, before going on to invoke the Fifth Amendment a whopping 111 times.
“Any reasonable person who has followed his unhinged obsession with me would readily come to the same conclusion,” Fauci said.
But BlazeTV host Stu Burguiere believes Paul’s obsession is actually the right kind of obsession to have.
“That’s not an obsession that’s unhealthy,” Stu says. “Being obsessed with fitness is not unhealthy. Being obsessed with eating right is not unhealthy. Being obsessed with making sure we hold people accountable for horrible things that occurred to the people of this country is not an unhealthy obsession.”
Stu also calls Fauci’s refusal to answer questions “unbelievable” and disrespectful.
“You have no respect for the legislative branch of government. The whole point — your entire career — is a long series of decisions made as essentially a technocrat without responsibility to the legislative branch,” he says.
Even when Fauci was asked simply whether or not there was a folder in front of him, he pleaded the Fifth.
“Even in mob hearings, they’ll answer some stuff,” co-host Dave Landau adds. “Yeah, he’s so guilty he’s not going to answer anything,”
Senator Josh Hawley also had a chance to go after Fauci — and he did not waste it.
“Let’s just get one thing straight. You don’t have any rights under the Fifth Amendment because you’ve been pardoned, as you very well know, as the Supreme Court has been clear for a century and more,” Hawley said, as Fauci looked on in silence.
Hawley pointed out that Fauci’s lawyers were sitting behind him “shifting nervously in their chairs” after he brought up his pardon.
“This isn’t about the Constitution. This isn’t about the law. This is about contempt. Contempt for this body and contempt for the American people. But I think I know why you’re doing it,” he said.
“It’s because you don’t want to answer questions. It’s because you did all kinds of terrible things. It’s because during the pandemic, you got rich, didn’t you? You got rich while people were dying — hundreds of thousands of Americans, over a million in the end. And you were getting rich,” he continued.
“And not only were you doing that,” he added, “you were using federal employees with taxpayer money to apply for and solicit cash prizes for you personally. Cash prizes totaling over a million dollars. You did all of that during the pandemic, didn’t you?”
Fauci then, unsurprisingly, invoked the Fifth Amendment again.
“I mean, look,” Stu says, “if he answers them, he’s going to lie anyway. But he knows that he’s going to lie. He’s not going to tell the truth. And if he does that, then he opens himself up for even more.”
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Days after Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) released more than 1,100 pages of Dr. Anthony Fauci's pandemic-era diary, Fauci — a man who apparently had plenty to say in private — had little to say to the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.
On Wednesday, Fauci walked in and invoked the Fifth Amendment 111 times, according to Paul. When Fauci's attorney tried to jump in out of turn, security dragged him out, the room erupting in applause.
'All he had to do today was tell the truth ... even if he admitted to destroying thousands of records, which we think happened, there's no penalty attached. It would just be the truth.'
Democrats called it a "scapegoat" exercise and likened it to the McCarthy trials, but Republicans pressed anyway. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) tested Fauci's newfound silence with trivia — asking Fauci innocuous questions about the day of the week and the color of a tie and some carpet.
Fauci respectfully declined to answer each time, citing the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution.
However, Hawley shot back: "You don't have any rights under the Fifth Amendment, because you've been pardoned."
At the center of it all is Fauci's pardon from President Joe Biden. Some Republicans argue that the pardon is invalid outright, pointing to reports that it was executed by autopen rather than signed by hand.
BlazeTV host Matt Kibbe argued that the plea itself proves the point: "For perhaps the first time in his life, Anthony Fauci didn't seem to bask in the flood of cameras and public attention. Pleading the Fifth, not allowed under the terms of his pardon, should trigger criminal contempt of Congress charges. And jail time."
BlazeTV host Steve Deace went farther, arguing the fight isn't over even if the federal pardon holds: "There has to be consequences after this. ... There's no way that pardon is legitimate. And there has to be grounds for state Republican AGs to go after him even if it is. Because his pardon would not cover state offenses. And tyrannies and frauds were imposed at the state level."
Deace's book on Fauci, "Faucian Bargain," digs into this argument further.
RELATED: Fauci pleads the 5th, Paul removes his lawyer as hearing explodes
Blaze podcast host Daniel Horowitz argued that the GOP is dodging the real story: "While Fauci's behavior is obviously criminal and contemptible, it is also very revealing how most Republicans are still obfuscating the most important issue. Senator Ron Johnson continues to be the only Republican willing to discuss the dangers of the COVID vaccines and the questions it raises on the entire vaccine industry."
After the hearing, Paul was asked whether Fauci had any right to plead the Fifth at all.
He said it's likely headed to court: "This has probably never been tested legally. ... With the grant of immunity, do you still need Fifth Amendment protections, or do they apply?"
He argued that Fauci risked nothing by simply telling the truth: "All he had to do today was tell the truth. ... Even if he admitted to destroying thousands of records, which we think happened, there's no penalty attached. It would just be the truth."
RELATED: Puppy love: Diary exposes Fauci's crush on Julia Roberts
On next steps, Paul confirmed that the contempt vote is moving forward, though prosecution isn't up to him: "All I can do is recommend prosecution. I can't initiate a prosecution."
He closed by pointing to public sentiment: "I do know that a great number of the population feels that Anthony Fauci was dishonest because of what he was saying in private was different, or the opposite."
Mike Davis, founder of the Article III Project, framed it as an inescapable trap: "He either has that Biden pardon, and he's not subject to criminal liability for truthfully testifying today, and he refused — he pled the Fifth, illegally. Therefore, Rand Paul should hold him in contempt of Congress. ... Alternatively, if he didn't take that pardon from Biden, he should face charges for his crimes against humanity."
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A Senate committee voted to hold former White House Covid czar Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress on Thursday following his refusal to answer for his Covid lies and conduct throughout the lockdown period. “Holding a witness in contempt is a serious thing, and it should be rare,” Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chair […]
The witness who appears and stonewalls needs an objectively valid excuse; Fauci's blanket Fifth is not one.
By choosing the Fifth, Fauci may have abandoned his pardon and opened himself to criminal prosecution for any crimes during the pardon period.
'I feel great about it. I told you I would be on the right side of history,' said NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers.
Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times Wednesday during a tense hearing before a Senate committee.
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