The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee voted along party lines Thursday to hold former White House medical adviser Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress, and investigators now have his pandemic-era cellphone.
The 8-5 vote, with two additional Democratic "no" votes cast by proxy, came one week after Fauci sat before the panel and refused to answer a single question about his role in the COVID-19 pandemic. He invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination 111 times, The Hill reported. The former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, once the most powerful unelected public-health official in America, sat mute before the committee charged with overseeing the federal government's pandemic response.
Committee Chairman Sen. Rand Paul, the Kentucky Republican who has pursued Fauci's accountability for years, opened Thursday's proceedings by framing the vote as a constitutional necessity, not a political exercise:
"Holding a witness in contempt is a serious thing, and it should be rare. But the contempt power exists for precisely this circumstance. Oversight is not a courtesy this committee extends or a favor a former official grants us. It is a constitutional obligation."
Paul plans to bypass a full Senate floor vote and send the contempt referral directly to the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. He told reporters he did not want to "waste time" routing it through the full chamber. The referral is not a mandate, the Justice Department will decide whether to act, but it puts formal legal pressure on Fauci to cooperate or face prosecution.
The contempt vote was not the only blow to Fauci's stonewalling strategy Thursday. Sen. Ron Johnson's Senate subcommittee obtained a copy of Fauci's COVID-era cellphone from the Department of Health and Human Services, the New York Post reported. Investigators also have more than 1,000 pages of Fauci's personal diary.
Johnson said the device could fill in what Fauci refused to provide under oath:
"Hopefully, this device will address many of the questions he refused to answer at last week's hearing."
The diary entries have already produced revelations about Fauci's behind-the-scenes efforts to enlist political allies in managing his public image during the pandemic. Combined with the cellphone data, Republican investigators believe they can reconstruct the decision-making trail Fauci declined to explain in person.
Paul has also signaled that the investigation extends well beyond the hearing room. In May, he called for Fauci to be indicted for what Paul alleged was lying under oath in 2021 about gain-of-function research, the kind of experiments that can make viruses more dangerous to humans. That allegation sits at the center of a long-running dispute over whether U.S. taxpayer dollars, channeled through Fauci's agency, helped fund the type of research in Wuhan, China, that some scientists believe may have contributed to the pandemic.
The committee's Democrats fought the contempt resolution at every procedural turn. Ranking member Sen. Gary Peters of Michigan, along with Sens. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, brought multiple motions to table the resolution. The Republican majority voted each one down.
Peters framed the proceedings as a threat to future congressional oversight. He told the committee:
"Following a one-sided investigation and a rushed process that has repeatedly excluded the minority and other members of this committee, the chairman is now asking the committee to take a vote that could harm our ability to conduct future investigations and disregards constitutional protections long recognized by the U.S. Senate."
The Democratic argument centers on former President Joe Biden's pardon. Before leaving office, Biden issued a sweeping pardon covering Fauci for any offense he may have committed between January 1, 2014, and January 19, 2025. Peters argued in a letter to colleagues that the pardon does not strip Fauci of his Fifth Amendment rights because he still faces a "real and appreciable" risk of federal or state prosecution.
That argument cuts in an odd direction. If Fauci's own allies believe he still faces real legal jeopardy despite a presidential pardon, jeopardy serious enough to justify invoking the Fifth 111 times, it raises the question of just how much the pardon was designed to protect and how much it actually covers. Paul and the Republican majority see it differently: if Biden's blanket pardon is valid, Fauci has no federal criminal exposure left, and therefore no legitimate basis to refuse testimony.
Rep. James Comer put the Republican position bluntly, as Fox News reported: "If former President Biden's blanket autopen pardon is valid, then Dr. Fauci has no right to refuse to answer questions."
Fauci's attorneys, in a letter sent the week before the vote, argued that Paul's stated goal of seeing Fauci imprisoned contradicts his insistence that the former official should testify freely without concern about legal consequences. The argument amounts to saying Paul cannot simultaneously seek criminal punishment and demand unguarded testimony.
Paul did not directly address the contradiction in Thursday's proceedings. Instead, he told reporters the legal arguments would be made to the Justice Department along with the referral. "It's a good legal discussion, and we will make those legal points to DOJ in sending the referral over," Paul said.
The effort to compel Fauci's testimony has been building for months. Paul moved earlier this year to subpoena Fauci as part of a broader push to investigate the origins of COVID-19 and the federal government's pandemic response. That subpoena set the stage for the July 29 hearing where Fauci sat silent.
The question now shifts to the Justice Department. Criminal contempt referrals from congressional committees do not always result in prosecution, historically, the DOJ has exercised broad discretion in deciding whether to act. But the political and public pressure on this referral is considerable. Millions of Americans lived through school closures, business shutdowns, and vaccine mandates shaped in large part by Fauci's public guidance, and many still want a full accounting of the decisions that drove those policies.
The investigative pressure extends beyond the Senate. The House has pursued its own lines of inquiry, and journalists who questioned Fauci's guidance during the pandemic have described professional consequences for doing so. The pattern, official silence, legal maneuvering, and institutional protection, has only deepened public frustration with the lack of accountability.
Meanwhile, the media landscape around COVID accountability remains contested. Sen. Ron Johnson has faced his own obstacles in getting pandemic-related findings into public view, with major outlets declining to publish his work on vaccine safety data.
The facts before the committee are straightforward. Fauci received a pardon broad enough to cover more than a decade of potential offenses. He then appeared before a Senate committee investigating the worst public-health crisis in a century and refused to say a single word of substance. The committee responded with a contempt vote. Paul is sending the referral to prosecutors. And investigators now hold Fauci's phone and diary.
Whether the Justice Department acts on the referral remains an open question. So does whether state prosecutors might pursue charges that fall outside Biden's federal pardon, a possibility Peters himself raised by acknowledging that "real and appreciable" legal risk persists.
A man who spent years lecturing the American public from behind a microphone now refuses to answer a single question under oath. The contempt vote is Congress saying that silence has a price.