The Senate Homeland Security Committee voted along party lines to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress after he invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times, and now Senate investigators have a copy of his COVID-era cellphone.
The 8-5 vote sends a contempt resolution forward without a full Senate floor vote, a procedural move that lets Committee Chairman Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., refer the matter directly to the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. Paul has made clear he intends to do so immediately, pressing the Department of Justice to consider criminal charges against the former chief medical advisor to the president.
Fauci appeared before the committee on July 29 and refused to answer questions from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, citing his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. He invoked that right more than 100 times during the hearing on pandemic response and the origins of COVID-19, declining to engage even on questions that observers described as seemingly harmless.
The contempt vote followed days later on a strict party-line split, every Republican on the panel voted yes, every Democrat voted no. Paul's resolution includes a provision that bypasses the full Senate, where Republicans would likely lack the 60 votes needed to advance it. Instead, the referral goes straight to the Justice Department.
Paul had signaled for days that he would not let the matter stall. Speaking to Fox News Digital ahead of the hearing, the Kentucky senator framed the coming legal fight in blunt terms.
"It's a good legal discussion, and we will make those legal points to DOJ in sending the referral over."
Paul has accused Fauci of funding "risky" research allegedly linked to a COVID-19 lab leak in China, a charge Fauci has long disputed. The feud between the two men stretches back to the earliest days of the pandemic. But the contempt charge rests on a narrower question: whether Fauci had the legal right to refuse to answer Congress at all.
That question turns on the preemptive pardon former President Joe Biden granted Fauci before leaving office. House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., has argued that the pardon, which he described as a "blanket autopen pardon", actually strips Fauci of his Fifth Amendment shield. The logic: if a pardon removes the threat of federal prosecution for past acts, there is no self-incrimination left to fear, and therefore no valid basis for refusing to testify.
Comer put it plainly in a statement:
"If former President Biden's blanket autopen pardon is valid, then Dr. Fauci has no right to refuse to answer questions."
The legal question is genuinely unsettled. AP News reported that Biden's pardon covered Fauci's acts from 2014 to January 2025, but it would not protect him from potential state prosecutions or false-statement charges arising from future testimony. That gap matters. If Fauci answered questions under oath and contradicted his earlier statements, he could face new criminal exposure the pardon does not reach.
Mark Osler, a law professor at St. Thomas University, told AP the case carries weight beyond Fauci himself:
"This is an important case because I think a lot of people anticipate that President Trump is going to issue similar pardons to many people in his administration who will end up being called before Congress, and the precedent here is important."
Michael Gerhardt, a University of North Carolina law professor, offered a different read, telling AP that Fauci's decision to invoke the Fifth "makes sense because he was invited into a situation where everyone in the country understood that Rand Paul was trying to set him up for a criminal prosecution." That framing may play well in faculty lounges, but it does not address the central legal problem: a pardoned witness who refuses to speak leaves Congress with no mechanism to get answers.
The contempt vote did not happen in isolation. Before the July 29 hearing, Paul's Homeland Security panel received more than 1,000 pages of Fauci's personal diary. The diary's contents have already raised questions about whether Fauci privately gave the lab-leak hypothesis more credibility than he ever acknowledged in public or under oath.
National Review reported that the contempt resolution stems specifically from Fauci's refusal to answer questions about those diary entries, entries that suggest a gap between what he said behind closed doors and what he told the American public at the start of the pandemic.
Comer's House Oversight Committee is pursuing its own line of inquiry. He said the diary should have been turned over to his committee during the previous Congress, and signaled that Fauci will be called back to answer for his earlier testimony.
"Based on the release of Dr. Fauci's diary, which should have been provided to the House Oversight Committee last Congress...we'll be asking Dr. Fauci whether he stands by his previous testimony to our Committee."
And then there is the cellphone. The Department of Health and Human Services, now led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., sent a copy of Fauci's pandemic-era phone to the Senate Homeland Security Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, chaired by Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis. Johnson's subcommittee falls under Paul's broader panel. Fox News Digital confirmed the phone is now in investigators' possession, though it remains unclear whether Paul and Johnson have yet accessed the data on it.
What that phone contains, emails, texts, call logs, encrypted messages, could fill in gaps that Fauci's diary alone cannot. Or it could amount to nothing. But the fact that HHS turned it over voluntarily, under Kennedy's leadership, marks a sharp departure from the stonewalling that defined the previous administration's posture toward congressional oversight of Fauci.
The federal contempt track is not the only legal front Fauci faces. Alabama and Florida have moved to pursue state-level cases against him following his Fifth Amendment refusals. Biden's pardon covers federal offenses only. State charges, if filed, would operate on an entirely separate track, one the former president's last-minute legal shield cannot reach.
The Washington Examiner reported that the committee vote could lead either to a DOJ referral for prosecution or to a push for a full Senate vote, though Paul has made clear he prefers the faster route. The Just The News account noted that the process is complicated by the preemptive pardon, which creates a legal gray area the Justice Department will have to navigate.
Several questions remain unanswered. What specific questions did Fauci refuse to address? Does the contempt resolution cover only his Fifth Amendment invocations, or broader non-cooperation? And will the DOJ under the current administration actually pursue charges, or let the referral gather dust?
Paul has left no ambiguity about what he wants. He has publicly demanded that Fauci "end up behind bars" and moved to fast-track the contempt vote before the Senate recess could delay it further. Whether the Justice Department shares that urgency will determine whether the contempt charge carries real consequences or becomes another Washington gesture.
A man who spent years telling Americans to "follow the science" now refuses to answer the questions. Congress is right to insist that accountability is not optional, even for the people who once claimed to speak for it.
