A US Senate committee has voted to hold Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress after the former senior public health official refused to answer questions during a hearing examining his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The vote, which fell along party lines, allows the committee to refer the case to the justice department for possible prosecution over alleged failure to comply with a congressional subpoena. It remains unclear whether federal prosecutors will pursue the matter.
Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination more than 100 times during testimony last week, according to the source material. He argued that Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky was seeking to put him “behind bars”.
Paul, the committee’s Republican chairman, said before the vote that the issue was whether a subpoenaed witness could refuse to answer questions after being directed to respond by the chair.
“The chair directed Anthony Fauci to answer. He refused,” Paul said. “That is what we are voting on today — not his opinions, not his policies, not anything he said from the podium six years ago.”
He added: “We are voting on whether a witness who has received the benefit of a federal pardon can be ordered by this committee to answer questions and then defy that order without consequence.”
The move marks the latest escalation in a long-running dispute between Fauci and Republican lawmakers over the origins of Covid-19 and the US government’s pandemic response. The origins of the virus have remained the subject of intense political debate in the United States since the pandemic began in 2020.
Paul has for years accused Fauci of attempting to conceal the origins of the pandemic and of funding research connected to a laboratory in Wuhan, China, where some proponents of the lab-leak theory believe the pandemic began. Most scientists believe exposure to an infected animal remains the more likely origin of the pandemic.
Fauci has repeatedly denied wrongdoing. During last week’s hearing, he accused Paul of having an “obvious obsession” with prosecuting him.
“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 said.
Gary Peters, the top Democrat on the committee, defended Fauci and accused Paul of conducting a “rushed investigation” as part of a “yearslong campaign” to prosecute him.
In a statement after the vote, Fauci’s lawyer David Schertler called the contempt effort a “crude political stunt” intended to “punish Dr Fauci for exercising his constitutional right”.
Schertler also called on the Senate to “reject Senator Paul’s meritless and politically-motivated contempt resolution”, according to statements quoted by US news outlets.
“For years, Senator Paul has proclaimed to anyone who would listen that Dr Fauci should be prosecuted and put in prison,” Schertler said. “Dr Fauci has committed no crime — and Senator Paul knows it.”
Schertler has argued that Fauci is on “solid legal ground” in invoking the Fifth Amendment. In an email to CBS, the BBC’s US partner, last week, he said: “We are completely confident that Dr Fauci has a valid Fifth Amendment privilege here and is on solid legal ground in asserting it.”
The Fifth Amendment protects individuals from being compelled to incriminate themselves. Invoking it is not an admission of guilt; it is designed to protect against coercion, mistakes and shifting the burden of proof on to the person being questioned.
Former President Joe Biden issued Fauci a pre-emptive pardon on his final day in office in 2025, protecting him from federal prosecution for actions between 2014 and 2025. The pardon does not cover potential offences after that period, including contempt of Congress, and does not apply to state or local charges.
Paul bypassed a full Senate vote on the contempt resolution, saying he did not “want to waste time” going through that procedure. Normally, contempt resolutions approved by a committee are sent to the full Senate, where they require a 60-vote majority. Republicans currently hold 53 seats in the 100-member chamber.
Contempt prosecutions are rare, and convictions rarer. In 2024, former Trump allies Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro were both convicted of contempt and sentenced to jail terms, marking the first such convictions since the 1980s.
The justice department will now decide whether to act on any referral from the committee. No outcome is guaranteed, and the department has not indicated whether it will bring a case.
