Anthony Fauci just ran out of room to hide.
A Republican-led Senate committee voted to hold him in contempt, and even CNN had to admit what comes next could be very bad for the former government health czar.
And CNN’s own senior legal analyst Elie Honig told the network’s anchors flat out that the stakes for Dr Fauci could include a criminal indictment.
Fauci Takes the Fifth — More Than 100 Times
After a brief opening statement, Fauci pleaded the Fifth 111 times over the course of a three-hour hearing.
The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee voted to hold former Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci in criminal contempt of Congress for declining to answer questions about the COVID-19 pandemic.
The 8-7 vote was passed along party lines. “All he had to do was tell the truth,” Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) said before voting began.
Paul has repeatedly accused Fauci of knowing more about the origins of COVID-19 than he admits and of lying to the Senate about it.
And the hearing itself was anything but calm. Paul had Fauci’s attorney escorted out of the prior week’s hearing by armed Capitol Police officers.
Paul said his office would hand-deliver the contempt referral to federal authorities after the committee voted, arguing that Fauci could not rely on his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination to avoid answering lawmakers’ questions. The Justice Department confirmed later that it had received the document, saying “We are reviewing it, and will work with the Senate accordingly.”
Paul is seeking to speed through the process, bypassing a full Senate vote on contempt, in a break with longstanding precedent that some legal experts warned could undercut the government’s ability to bring charges against Fauci.
Vice President JD Vance will now need to sign off on the committee’s circumvention of long-established rules due to his constitutional role as president of the Senate.
Honig Drops the Warning No One at CNN Wanted to Deliver
CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig warned Dr Anthony Fauci could be facing some very heavy consequences after the Senate committee voted to hold him in contempt.
Honig argued Fauci had a “valid, legal right” to take the Fifth in front of the committee because his pardon from former President Joe Biden does not shield him from being prosecuted for “state crimes” and anything after January 2025.
But acknowledging the legal right to take the Fifth is not the same as saying there are no consequences for doing it. Honig made that clear.
“The complication here, of course… is that Dr Fauci received a pardon from Joe Biden. If a person has been pardoned, he cannot be criminally charged for anything within the scope of that pardon and, therefore, you cannot take the Fifth for anything within the scope of the pardon,” Honig explained. “But the third thing, and the wrinkle here, is Dr Fauci’s position through his lawyer is he might still have criminal exposure outside the scope of that pardon. That pardon only covers federal crimes,” Honig continued.
Honig pointed out that “in recent memory, for example, Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon, both were prosecuted, they were indicted, they were tried, they were convicted, and both went to prison for four months for contempt of Congress in relation to the January 6 investigation back in 2022-23.”
“So this is real. I mean, the stakes here for Dr Fauci could potentially be, depending what DOJ decides, a criminal indictment and prosecution.”
Worth noting: those words came from a CNN analyst. Not a conservative commentator. Not a Republican senator. The network that spent years treating Fauci as an untouchable figure of scientific authority is now airing segments about whether he could end up indicted.
Biden’s Pardon Has Holes — and State Attorneys General Are Already Probing Them
Fauci was among a group of perceived adversaries of Trump to be pardoned by Biden in one of the Democrat’s final acts in office. The clemency covered acts from 2014 to the date in January 2025 when the pardon was issued.
That time limit matters. Fauci’s pardon doesn’t cover actions taken after January 2025, including his testimony before the committee. If he made false statements or committed perjury, he could still be prosecuted.
The pardon also doesn’t shield him from state or local prosecution. Attorneys general for Florida, West Virginia and Louisiana have said they’re issuing Fauci subpoenas.
That’s not a small thing. State-level prosecution operates entirely outside the reach of a federal pardon, and multiple state attorneys general have made clear they intend to use that opening.
Honig, a former assistant US attorney for the Southern District of New York, noted: “If Dr Fauci maybe had a legal right to take the Fifth, that’s not going to be proof beyond a reasonable doubt that he committed a crime.” “So the bar is really high here.”
So Honig is threading a needle — acknowledging the criminal exposure is real while also cautioning that getting a conviction is a different matter entirely. That’s a fair read of where things stand legally. But the exposure is not hypothetical.
The Trump Justice Department has shown a willingness to pursue charges related to congressional testimony. Last year it brought charges against former FBI Director James Comey for testimony he gave on the Hill in 2020.
The question now isn’t whether Fauci has legal exposure. He does. The question is whether the Justice Department decides to act on it.
For years, millions of Americans watched Fauci dodge accountability — on the origins of COVID-19, on the funding of gain-of-function research, on the decisions that kept children out of school and small businesses shuttered. Paul put it plainly before the vote: “There will be another pandemic. The time to determine which legislative reforms are necessary to make sure the mistakes of the past are not repeated is now, not later.”
That argument is not about revenge. It’s about whether the American people ever get a full accounting of what happened during COVID-19, who made which decisions, and why the man who was at the center of it all suddenly couldn’t remember anything once he was under oath.
Fauci sat in that hearing room and took the Fifth more than a hundred times. If the answers were innocent, the silence is hard to explain. And if the answers were not innocent — well, that’s exactly what Senator Paul has been saying for years.
Sources: Mediaite, CNN, Roll Call, Fox News, The Hill, PBS NewsHour, ABC News, Megyn Kelly
