Anthony Fauci on Wednesday appeared before the U.S. Senate Homeland Security Committee, but pleaded the Fifth to avoid answering questions by Senator Rand Paul (R., Ky.) and others about his obfuscation of facts surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic.
Fauci told the committee in an opening statement that he believes in and respects “the value of legitimate congressional oversight,” and noted he had testified before or briefed Senate and House committees more than 200 times over his 38-year career. He mentioned appearing for hearings in the Senate and House for transcribed, sworn interviews about the Covid-19 pandemic.
“However, given Senator Paul’s obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution, his repeated slanderous comments about me, and recently his publicly releasing my unredacted personal diary aimed at embarrassing and intimidating me, 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.
“Any reasonable person who has followed his unhinged obsession with me would readily come to the same conclusion,” he added. “Therefore, although it pains me to do so because of the respect I have for the legislative branch of government and my decades long record of cooperating with Congress, under the advice of my attorneys I will invoke my right under the Fifth amendment of the Constitution to refrain from answering your questions.”
Fauci brought several attorneys with him to Wednesday’s hearing, one of whom was removed from the proceedings at Paul’s direction after the attorney continued to speak without being recognized.
After the hearing, Paul scheduled a vote on a resolution to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress for next week.
“If the vote is affirmative and sent to the Department of Justice, they will have to make a decision whether to pursue this,” Paul told reporters, adding that there is a question of whether Fauci needs or can apply Fifth amendment protections given that he has already been granted complete immunity by President Biden.
“All he had to do today was tell the truth,” Paul said. “If he testified and told the truth, even if he admitted to destroying thousands of records, which we think happened, there’s no penalty attached. It would just be the truth.”
He said there are “serious” scientific questions that need answers, particularly surrounding the origins of Covid-19 and gain-of-function research.
Paul subpoenaed Fauci for his testimony on Wednesday, which comes days after the senator released 1,141 pages of Fauci’s diary from 2019 to 2022 on Friday. The near-daily entries reveal Fauci misled Americans on a number of topics from Covid-19’s origins to its mortality rate, and his role in shutting down American society in 2020.
On January 26, 2020, Fauci wrote, “It now appears using epi data and genomic data that the first infection was in early December and was not connected to the market.”
“Now we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier,” he said. “Having said that, somewhere the virus jumped from animals to humans.” While Fauci does not seem to have ever explicitly stated that SARS-CoV-2 came from a wet market, he did not do anything to dispel the perception, as NR previously reported.
Instead, Fauci emphasized the likelihood of a “natural origin” and rejected the notion that the virus could have leaked from a lab.
The public has known for years now that Fauci “prompted” “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” a paper published in Nature Medicine in March 2020 that would go on to be widely cited by the journalists and public health officials who roundly dismissed the idea that Covid-19 had emerged from a lab leak in Wuhan, China.
But recent document dumps by Paul’s office show Fauci and other scientists, including those who authored the papers, were privately casting doubts about a natural origin for the virus.
Fauci’s diary details his February 1, 2020, call with a dozen scientists that ultimately led to the “Proximal Origin” paper. He reveals in his writings that just two of the scientists thought the virus had natural origins; the other ten “felt that deliberate insertion was possible,” Fauci wrote.
Not only that, but the scientists pointed to the gain-of-function studies on coronaviruses in Wuhan as a particular point of concern.
And yet, eight days after the call, Fauci went on Newt Gingrich’s podcast and dismissed a lab leak as “just conspiracy theories.”
Slack messages released by Paul’s office earlier last week showed the scientists behind the “Proximal Origins” paper began having doubts just three months after publishing their paper, which claimed that the Covid lab-leak theory was not “plausible.”
When asked publicly in April 2020 whether Covid-19 may have emerged from a lab, Fauci cited the paper to cast doubt on the theory.
Meanwhile, in a diary entry from March 15, 2020, Fauci recalls convincing then-New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and California Governor Gavin Newsom to close schools, bars and restaurants. And yet two years later, Fauci told The Hill he “didn’t recommend locking anything down.”
Fauci also testified before Congress on March 11, 2020, that the mortality rate of Covid was between 1 and 3 percent, or that Covid-19 was ten times more lethal than the seasonal flu.
But one month before his testimony, Fauci wrote in his diary about a conversation he had with former CDC director Tom Frieden in which they both agreed that the case fatality rate was “more like 0.2-0.3 % rather than 2.0%.”
Paul tried on Wednesday to question Fauci about several of these inconsistencies during the hearing, but Fauci pleaded the Fifth to every question asked by senators on both sides of the political aisle.
Democrats, for their part, came to Fauci’s defense, questioning why Paul was holding yet another hearing on Covid-19 and insisting there are more important matters for the committee to consider at this time, rather than relitigating the pandemic.
Senator Maggie Hassan (D., N.H.) told Fauci, “It must be enormously frustrating to know this hearing is designed to trap you.”
Senator Roger Marshall told reporters he believes Republicans will keep asking questions, despite Fauci’s decision to plead the Fifth, and said a special counsel should be appointed to further investigate Fauci and the pandemic.
“Why are there so many discrepancies in what was in his diary versus what he told us, what he told told the public?” Marshall asked.
Charles Hilu contributed reporting.