Anthony Fauci sat before a Senate committee on Wednesday and pleaded the Fifth Amendment 111 times. He already has a presidential pardon. He cannot be prosecuted. He simply did not want to answer the questions, and so he didn't, for nearly three hours, while Democratic senators thanked him for his service.
What 111 Looks Like in Practice
According to the New York Post, Fauci repeated the same line — 'On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer, based upon my rights, under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution' — over and over across a nearly three-hour hearing before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. One hundred and eleven times.
Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, apparently curious about how far this would go, forced Fauci to plead the Fifth rather than answer what color his tie was. What day it was. What color the carpet in front of him was. The answer, apparently, was still the Fifth.
For context, the New York Post notes that in the entire history of Congress, only a handful of mob bosses have invoked the privilege more often. Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who spent decades as America's top infectious disease expert, has now joined that very specific leaderboard.
The Pardon Nobody Seems to Want to Talk About
Here is the part that should stop you cold. Fauci has a pre-emptive presidential pardon. That means he has already been granted immunity from prosecution before any charges were ever filed. The legal jeopardy that the Fifth Amendment is designed to protect against does not exist for him right now.
So why plead the Fifth 111 times? The answer, depending on your read of the situation, is either that his lawyers are extraordinarily cautious, or that there are things Anthony Fauci simply does not want on the public record, under oath, ever. Those are the only two options. Pick one.
Sen. Rand Paul, who chairs the committee and has spent years pressing Fauci on gain-of-function research funding, was direct about what he wanted after the hearing. 'All he had to do was tell the truth,' Paul told reporters, according to the New York Post, and said he would pursue contempt of Congress charges — the same charge that sent Trump advisers Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro to prison.
What They Were Actually Asking About
The questions Fauci refused to answer were not random political theater, or at least not entirely. Paul pressed him specifically on the funding of gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses at a Chinese laboratory, research that a growing body of evidence and official assessments have linked to the origins of COVID-19. 'Admit it was a mistake to fund dangerous research in China,' Paul said on the Senate floor, per the New York Post. 'Ask forgiveness, and pledge to help our government devise safeguards, so a man-made epidemic never happens again.'
Sen. Ron Johnson detailed the human cost of decisions made during the pandemic. Sen. Rick Scott called Fauci 'a man who destroyed the public trust in America's public health institutions in exchange for five minutes of fame to fuel your own ego.' These are not subtle accusations.
The hearing also touched on Fauci's personal diaries, which HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been working to surface for months. According to the New York Post, RFK Jr. told Fox News it took about eight months to pull the documents off eleven separate servers where they had been, as he put it, 'sequestered and secreted.' The diaries reportedly show Fauci recording death tolls alongside detailed accounts of celebrity praise and private encouragement from journalists and political operatives throughout 2020.
The Democrats Who Showed Up to Applaud
While Paul and his Republican colleagues were reading out Fauci's alleged offenses, Democratic senators were doing something else entirely. According to the New York Post, they used their time to thank Fauci for his service, call him a scapegoat, and heap praise on him. New Jersey Sen. Andy Kim quoted Theodore Roosevelt's 'Man in the Arena' speech in Fauci's honor.
That's the speech about the man who strives valiantly, who errs, who comes short again and again. It's a good speech. It is somewhat less applicable to a situation where the man in the arena is pleading the Fifth 111 times while holding a pardon, but the Senate is a place where the right speech can redeem almost any circumstance.
This was not a divided hearing in the sense that both sides made competing arguments about the facts. It was a divided hearing in the sense that one side was asking questions and the other side was celebrating the man who refused to answer them. That is its own kind of answer.
The Lawyer Who Got Thrown Out
There was one genuinely theatrical moment that the New York Post flagged, and it deserves its own entry. Fauci's criminal lawyer, David Schertler, apparently decided at some point that he could interject and rebut the senators directly, on behalf of his client. Rand Paul threw him out of the hearing room. The public gallery applauded.
Fauci still had a half dozen other lawyers present, Paul noted afterward. The New York Post raises a pointed and currently unanswered question: who is paying for all of them?
At 85, Fauci is unlikely to face criminal prosecution regardless of what Paul does next. The pardon forecloses the most serious legal exposure. What is being contested now is something messier and harder to resolve than a court verdict — it's the historical record, and what gets attached to his name.
The Dingo Take
You are supposed to believe that a man who cannot be prosecuted, who holds a pre-emptive pardon signed before he was ever charged with anything, sat before the United States Senate and declined to answer 111 questions on Fifth Amendment grounds because his lawyers are just being careful. That is the charitable read. Hold it in your mind and see how long it stays there.
The actual problem here is larger than Fauci, who is 85 and has already escaped the legal consequences that Paul and others think he deserves. The problem is that the answers to the questions he refused to answer — about what the government knew, what research it funded, what got covered up and when — still matter. The pandemic killed millions of people. The public still does not have a full accounting of how it started, and the man who was at the center of the American response just demonstrated, for three hours, in front of cameras, that he has no intention of providing one.
Contempt of Congress charges against an 85-year-old with a presidential pardon is more political symbol than legal mechanism. Everyone in that room knows it. What actually happened Wednesday is that Fauci sat down, said nothing 111 times, and let the silence make his statement for him. Whether you read that silence as a man protecting himself or a man with nothing left to lose, it is not the behavior of someone with a clear conscience.
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