WASHINGTON — When Anthony Fauci plead the fifth over 100 times during a Senate hearing last week, many Americans were pleased that the face of the Biden administration’s coronavirus response was forced to face his critics. But many other Americans were left wondering: would Fauci face anything worse than an embarrassing viral hearing?
He will if Senator Rand Paul has anything to say about it.
The Kentucky Republican is determined to bring the former head of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases to justice. Speaking to The Daily Wire Wednesday, Paul explained why he’s confident that the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee will hold the embattled doctor in contempt — and what he thinks could happen next.
“Historically, votes like this have gone to the full Senate, but I think there’s no absolute rule that says we can’t send it directly to the Department of Justice,” Paul said. “So my plan is that if we win the vote on Thursday, to immediately send it to the Department of Justice with a recommendation for prosecution, even if it passes the whole Senate.”
Paul’s office sent two criminal referrals to the Biden Justice Department, the senator said, and two more under President Donald Trump’s administration.
“This will be the first time that our entire committee or the majority of our committee sends it,” he noted. “So we’ll see what happens. We’ll discuss with [Senate Majority Leader John] Thune whether or not he thinks he can get the votes to do it on the floor.”
A floor vote would require 60 votes to pass, meaning Democrats would have to cooperate. Asked about this subject last week, Thune said that Fauci’s answers were “completely inadequate” and that the floor vote was “certainly an option that ought to be available to us.”
But Paul isn’t optimistic that Democrats will be willing to go after Fauci (who did not respond to requests for comment from the Daily Wire).
“They’ve decided that they don’t seem to mind that he funded this dangerous research in a foreign country, in a country that’s largely opaque, often accused of dishonesty,” he said. “They just don’t seem to care. They care more about defending government experts against any kind of skepticism. So we’ll see where it goes.”
Instead, Paul is pushing for the Justice Department to prosecute Fauci for contempt of Congress. Paul says he’s going to be sending the DOJ a legal brief arguing that the Fifth Amendment did not protect Fauci, since he was granted a pardon by President Joe Biden, and was thus only being asked to tell the truth.
The most notable would be to send Fauci to prison — a popular rallying cry for the MAGA base, and not without precedent. Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon was convicted on two counts of criminal contempt of Congress in 2022 for refusing to comply with the January 6 Committee. He served a four-month sentence.
Former Trump adviser Peter Navarro also defied a subpoena from the January 6 committee and served a four-month prison sentence ending in July 2024.
Statutory penalties for contempt of Congress, a federal misdemeanor, carry fines between $100 and $100,000 and mandatory sentencing of one to 12 months in prison.
Paul pointed to Bannon’s and Navarro’s imprisonments, noting that they refused to show up and testify. Fauci did show up, he said, but declined to answer senators’ questions. The senator also addressed concerns and criticisms from those who argue that Republicans do not take real action, but merely hold high-profile hearings.
“I’m not a prosecutor,” he said, “and so sometimes people on the internet get confused and they say, ‘Oh you’re just having hearings.’ Well, that’s the power I have. I have the power to do that. I have the power of funding, but prosecutorial power isn’t given to Congress. We cannot put Anthony Fauci in jail. That would require the prosecutors, the Department of Justice, to do it. So I do what I can.”
Photo by Patrick Semansky-Pool/Getty Images)
Paul also hopes that placing Fauci under renewed scrutiny will force public officials to reckon with whether it was a good idea to fund this “dangerous research in China,” and whether this should be done again in the future. He’s part of that decision-making process, and has supported Trump’s executive order banning gain-of-function research.
Paul has also presented the Risky Research Review Act, which would create a presidential commission whereby Trump would appoint members to review all gain-of-function research and ensure that the United States isn’t funding any dangerous research in any country.
The Kentucky senator hasn’t talked to Trump about Fauci recently, he says, but he does believe the president is “concerned.”
“Part of the reason he picked [Robert F. Kennedy Jr.] at [the Department of Health and Human Services], for many different reasons, was that Bobby Kennedy … was very, very skeptical about this type of research. The fact that we now have an executive order stopping it is good, but executive order is only so good as long as Trump is president.”
“So I’d like to change the law,” he added. “They’ve been working on a policy, and I think the policy is similar to my bill. So we would like to get them more active.”
He’ll be asking Trump and his administration to support the bill, very aware of the impact that could have on the legislation.
Asked about what was running through his head as he looked across his desk at Fauci during the now-infamous hearing, Paul said he felt disappointment.
“Sadness,” he reflected, “that a man who served his country for 40 years couldn’t admit that he made a mistake, and couldn’t admit that there’s a reason why people are outraged. A million Americans died, and he knowingly funded this research. It wasn’t like he made a split-second mistake.”
“He’d been in favor of funding this research since at least 2009, when he funded dangerous research in the Netherlands that took the bird flu and mutated it to make it more infectious through the air and between mammals, so yeah, he’s been a supporter of this from the get-go,” Paul went on. “He wrote in the Washington Post that even if a scientist should be bitten, even if a lab should leak a pandemic and a pandemic should occur, that the knowledge was worth the risks. But many scientists have said the opposite.”
Many people don’t realize that this debate began a decade before the pandemic, Paul said, but it continued through the pandemic, and Fauci bears responsibility. And the Kentucky senator wants the world to understand how dangerous gain-of-function research is.
“I think we are now winning that argument with this administration, and my goal is to try to, in the future, make it less likely that we’ll have a man-made pandemic.”
