Dr. Anthony Fauci showed up on Capitol Hill under subpoena Wednesday and refused to answer questions about COVID-19 origins during a fiery Senate hearing led by one of his fiercest Republican critics.
The former chief medical adviser repeatedly invoked the Fifth Amendment as Sen. Rand Paul pressed him on the pandemic, federally backed research and the still-disputed origins of the virus.
Fauci gave the same answer again and again during the opening round of questioning before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
‘On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution,’ Fauci told Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul numerous times in the opening round of questions.
Fauci used his opening statement to accuse Paul of targeting him for political reasons.
During his opening statement, Fauci earlier accused Paul of having an ‘unhinged obsession’ with him.
‘Given Senator Paul’s obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution, his repeated slanderous comments about me, and recently his publicly releasing my unredacted personal diary aimed at embarrassing and intimidating me,’ Fauci noted.
‘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,’ Fauci continued.
‘Any reasonable person who has followed his unhinged obsession with me would readily come to the same conclusion,’ he added.
Paul, who has spent years accusing Fauci of misleading the public and Congress about COVID-era research, did not back off.
The hearing grew tense when Fauci’s attorney, David Schertler, attempted to speak on behalf of his client.
Paul ordered Schertler to leave the hearing room, and Capitol Police escorted him out.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., later read a statement from Fauci’s attorney during his remarks.
The statement accused Paul’s hearing of not being ‘a serious effort to seek information,’ and said the Republican has ‘built a personal brand,’ around his push to prosecute Fauci.
Paul defended the decision to remove Schertler, saying a witness cannot refuse to answer questions while letting his lawyer testify in his place.
‘The attorney is complaining and testifying, saying you didn’t do it. The prosecution is unfair. You don’t get to do that. That’s one thing you give up when you take the Fifth Amendment and say I’m not going to testify, I’m not going to give you information.’
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‘He was not invited to testify, and he was out of order, and it was appropriate to have him ejected,’ Paul noted, defending his prior decision to kick Schertler out.
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., also pressed Fauci, accusing him of using federal employees and taxpayer-funded resources to seek awards and cash recognition during the pandemic.
‘You turned your staff into a full-time application machine. You actually wrote to people and said, “Do you think maybe I qualify?” And you got cash for all of this. And it wasn’t just one or two employees, was it? In fact, you used eight separate federal employees on federal time using federal resources to solicit cash for that,’ Hawley probed.
Fauci again invoked the Fifth Amendment while Hawley questioned him.
Hawley argued that Fauci should not be able to rely on the Fifth Amendment because former President Joe Biden had already pardoned him.
‘As the Supreme Court has been clear for a century or more, Brown versus Walker, 1896. When he has been pardoned, he may not stand upon his privilege.’
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The hearing came days after Paul released Fauci’s personal pandemic-era diary entries, adding another front to the long-running fight over COVID accountability.
Fauci, the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, became a household name during the pandemic and later served as chief medical adviser to Biden.
To critics on the right, he also became the symbol of a federal COVID response that shut down daily life, pushed sweeping mandates and dismissed dissent from Americans who questioned official guidance.
Paul accused Fauci of revealing ‘his love for the newfound fame COVID brought him’ before publishing a paragraph the Senator says is of him ‘fangirling’ over explaining Amazon’s virtual assistant Alexa to Barbra Streisand.
‘She wanted to know if it was okay to get [an] mRNA vaccine. I told her yes,’ Fauci wrote of the ‘great call.’
Fauci then wrote about listening to Streisand’s music on Alexa before saying the longtime star ‘really did not know what Alexa was.’
He also admitted to having ‘butt called’ her later the same day, only to discover Streisand had been planning to call him anyway to ask about differences between the Moderna and Pfizer shots.
During that call, Fauci said he demonstrated how Alexa worked by asking the device to play Streisand songs.
The diary release added new fuel to a yearslong fight between Paul and Fauci over pandemic transparency, NIH-backed research and whether federal officials were honest with the public about what they knew.
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Fauci has denied that NIH funded research that created the virus responsible for the pandemic.
The origins of COVID-19 remain disputed, with U.S. intelligence agencies divided between natural transmission and a possible lab-related incident.
No definitive conclusion has been reached.
But Wednesday’s hearing gave Republicans a new flashpoint in their effort to investigate the government’s COVID response.
Fauci, who spent years defending federal pandemic guidance, declined to answer questions under oath on the advice of his attorney.
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