Fauci Pleads the Fifth 111 Times. Now They Have His Phone.

What Actually Happened at the Hearing

Rand Paul called the hearing. That alone tells you everything you need to know about the temperature of the room. Paul, who has spent years pursuing Fauci with a fervor that Fauci himself described as an "unhinged obsession," chaired the Senate committee session on COVID-19 origins. Fauci showed up. And then he didn't say much.

Fauci pleaded the Fifth 111 times. His reasoning, laid out in his opening statement, was that Paul had publicly pledged to put him "behind bars" and had released his unredacted personal diary to the press ahead of the hearing to embarrass him. Fauci's conclusion: the whole exercise wasn't a legitimate investigation. It was a setup. "The only conclusion I can reach," Fauci said, "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.'" Hard to argue with that read.

Paul's response was to warn Fauci from the dais that obstruction of a congressional investigation is against the law and that the committee would consider "appropriate action." He also confirmed, per the New York Post, that he intends to refer Fauci directly to the Justice Department for potential prosecution without waiting for a full Senate vote.

The Biden Pardon Problem

Here is where it gets legally interesting. Joe Biden issued Fauci a sweeping pardon before leaving office in January 2025. Republicans on the committee have seized on this as their main argument against the Fifth Amendment invocations: if you've been pardoned, they say, you can't be prosecuted, so you have no grounds to self-incriminate, so you have no legal right to stay silent.

This is a real legal debate, not just a talking point. The Fifth Amendment protects against compelled self-incrimination, and the theory goes that a blanket pardon eliminates the risk of incrimination, which eliminates the protection. It's been tested in courts before, with mixed results. What's not in dispute is that Republicans are going to use it to push this contempt referral to DOJ and see what happens under a Justice Department that is, at the moment, not exactly skeptical of the premise that Fauci belongs in prison.

Fauci's camp would presumably argue that the pardon's scope has limits, that future legal exposure remains possible, and that being frog-marched into testimony by a committee whose chairman has literally promised your prosecution on the record is not the same as a neutral inquiry. But the committee is not interested in that argument right now.

They Have His Phone

Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin and chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, confirmed Wednesday on X that the panel had obtained a copy of Fauci's COVID-era cellphone from the Department of Health and Human Services. The Wall Street Journal first reported the handover. Johnson posted that the device "will hopefully address many of the questions he refused to answer at last week's hearing."

The phone is from Fauci's time as NIAID director, which he led for 38 years before retiring at the end of 2022. The department that handed it over is now run by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who in 2021 published a conspiracy-laden book attacking Fauci that sold more than a million copies. Among the people who provided blurbs for that book: Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, Alan Dershowitz, and Tony Robbins. Not a virologist among them. Kennedy's HHS handing Fauci's personal device to a hostile Senate panel is not a coincidence. It is a choice.

The Diary and the Wet Market

Paul released hundreds of pages from Fauci's official diary ahead of the hearing, framing it as a bombshell. Parts of it were. The diary showed Fauci privately ruled out the Wuhan wet market as the source of COVID-19 as early as January 2020, according to the New York Post. That matters because Fauci publicly suggested the wet market origin throughout 2020, 2021, and even into June 2024. If his private notes said something different years before his public statements caught up, that's a legitimate question worth asking.

The diary also showed Fauci obsessively tracked his own media appearances during the pandemic. Which is, honestly, a very human and somewhat understandable thing for a man who became the most famous doctor in America overnight to do. Paul, however, released the diary unredacted, personal information included, which is why Fauci cited it specifically as evidence of harassment and intimidation in his opening statement. The diary also contained Fauci's private assessments of Donald Trump, which he described as "rambling," "crazy," "desperate," "bumbling," "incompetent," "an idiot," "a true embarrassment," "totally nuts," and "truly an obnoxious adolescent." Whether those descriptions were accurate is left as an exercise for the reader.

Scientists Push Back

One hundred and fifty-five scientists signed an open letter this week calling on the government to stop what they described as the "vilification and harassment of many American scientists," as the Guardian reports. The letter didn't name Fauci specifically but the timing is not subtle.

Democratic Senator Gary Peters of Michigan put the stakes plainly: "This is only going to deter other scientific experts from public service." That is the actual long-term damage here, separate from whatever happens to Fauci personally. When the lesson scientists draw from watching a 38-year public servant get his private diary published and his personal phone handed to political enemies is that public service ends in a congressional show trial, fewer scientists take the job. That is not a hypothetical. That is an incentive structure.