Anthony Fauci sat before the US Senate and took the Fifth 111 times.
Republicans on the committee voted to hold him in contempt anyway, and Senator Rand Paul skipped the Senate floor entirely and sent the referral straight to the Justice Department.
And now a separate Senate panel has quietly obtained a forensic copy of Fauci’s pandemic-era iPhone, and investigators say the investigation is just getting started.
The Phone, the Journals, and Millions of Pages Still Coming
A Senate committee led by Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) obtained a forensic copy of Dr Anthony Fauci’s cellphone, with the Department of Health and Human Services handing over the device data to the Senate Homeland Security Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.
The subcommittee acquired an iPhone that is a copy of the iPhone Fauci used while he was director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from 1984 to 2022, according to a spokeswoman for Senator Johnson.
Whether the panel has full access to the phone’s contents remains unclear, according to a spokesperson for the senator who told Fox News Digital the subcommittee “obtained a copy of Dr Fauci’s iPhone that was used during his time at HHS.”
Senate investigators hold an encrypted iPhone disk image, and iOS encryption may make it unreadable without his passcode. Agencies that issue government phones typically configure them with Mobile Device Management profiles that can enforce encryption policies, but MDM does not provide investigators with a backdoor past iOS’s cryptographic protections. What investigators can do with the copy depends on whether they have the passcode, whether any forensic tool has a working exploit for the specific iOS version on the device, and what data the government’s MDM profile exposes at the system level.
That’s a real complication, and it’s worth being honest about. But the phone is only one piece of what’s coming.
Investigators are also reviewing a much larger collection of records. Senator Johnson and Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) obtained millions of pages from federal databases related to Fauci and are seeking additional material, according to people familiar with the matter.
The phone acquisition also follows HHS’s move to turn over more than 1,000 pages of Fauci’s personal diary to the panel just days before his Senate hearing.
Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr said his team spent roughly eight months tracking down those diary entries. “It took us about eight months to dig these out of 11 separate servers where they had been sequestered and secreted,” Kennedy said.
And Kennedy now oversees the very department that held all of this material for years without turning it over. That’s not a small detail.
111 Times and a Contempt Referral Heading to the DOJ
A Senate panel voted along party lines to hold Dr Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress after he refused to answer questions about his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee approved the contempt resolution in an 8-7 vote, following through with threats from committee chairman Senator Rand Paul (R-KY).
Paul stressed that the panel was not voting on Fauci’s opinions or policies, but on “whether a witness, who has received the benefit of a sweeping federal pardon, can be ordered by this committee to answer questions — and then defy that order without consequence.” “The witness had many chances to answer the questions pertinent to our investigation, and he made his decision 111 times,” Paul said.
Fauci defended his decision to invoke his Fifth Amendment rights by arguing Paul would spur contentious lines of questioning in order to “get me to say something, anything, that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, quote, behind bars, unquote.”
Fauci’s legal counsel David Schertler called the contempt vote “a crude political stunt intended to punish Dr Fauci for exercising his constitutional rights.” “The Senate should reject Senator Paul’s meritless and politically-motivated contempt resolution,” Schertler said in a statement.
But Paul didn’t wait around for the full Senate to weigh in.
Paul told the Washington Examiner following the contempt hearing that his team would “hand deliver today” the contempt referral to acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and the US Attorney for the District of Columbia, Jeanine Pirro.
The move skips the usual full Senate floor vote entirely, where Democrats would most certainly have blocked it.
Fauci is under a presidential pardon for all actions taken between January 1, 2014, and January 19, 2025, from former President Joe Biden, which has prompted widespread doubt on whether he is able to invoke his Fifth Amendment right to not self-incriminate.
Biden granted that pardon on January 19, 2025, but it was executed via autopen, a mechanical signature device, raising questions about whether Biden personally reviewed or authorized it. The Trump administration has declared autopen-signed pardons null and void, a position that, if upheld, could strip Fauci of his federal immunity entirely.
That’s the thread Paul is pulling. If the pardon is invalid, Fauci had no legal basis to take the Fifth at all.
Three States Now Investigating, and the Questions Keep Piling Up
Three state attorneys general have subpoenaed Dr Anthony Fauci as part of a joint investigation into his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier issued an investigative subpoena to Fauci as part of a joint probe launched with Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill and West Virginia Attorney General John McCuskey.
Uthmeier stated, “Government officials have a certain level of immunity in their official capacities, but if Fauci personally profited off of the ‘guidance’ he issued, that very well could have broken Florida law.” “Fauci’s diary focused more on self-promotion than the legitimate safety concerns from the mRNA vaccines. While Fauci was pushing for book deals, awards, and fortune and fame, Floridians were being deceived and harmed by his misrepresentations.”
Those diary entries, according to Uthmeier’s office, reveal that Fauci had allegedly been awarded approximately a $900,000 Dan David Foundation prize and an NIAID research grant to the University of Florida Scripps Biomedical Research program, as well as numerous board positions and professorships.
Louisiana AG Liz Murrill put it plainly: “What we know already is Fauci lied — we just don’t know yet how much. But he lied about something as basic as keeping a diary.”
That last line is worth sitting with. For years, the public was told Fauci was a straight-shooting scientist above politics. His own diary, kept on a government server, is now the document driving multiple state investigations and a contempt referral to the Justice Department.
Senator Paul raised the central question about the research side of things during a Fox News appearance: “The question is this: should we be paying for the taxpayer to take animal viruses and purposely mutate them to become human viruses? He knew it was going on. In January of 2020, his private notes say, ‘We’re suspicious of the Chinese because we know they do gain-of-function research.’ But if he was suspicious, why did he fund them?”
That question has been hanging in the air for five years. Now there’s a phone, a diary, millions of pages of records, and a contempt referral to the DOJ. Fauci’s lawyers can call it a political stunt. But the paper trail doesn’t care what they call it.
Shortly before leaving office, former President Joe Biden granted Fauci a preemptive pardon amid concerns Republicans would pursue criminal charges related to his pandemic decisions. That pardon was supposed to be the end of it. The state investigations suggest it wasn’t.
The Make America Healthy Again movement has argued from the start that the pandemic response deserved real scrutiny, not just a political pass. Secretary Kennedy spent eight months digging through eleven government servers to surface documents that Biden’s HHS apparently had no interest in sharing. The phone is now in Senate hands. The referral is at the DOJ. And investigators say millions more pages are still on the way.
The people who locked down schools, mandated injections, and told Americans to trust the process are now the ones pleading the Fifth. That’s not nothing.
Sources: Breitbart, Fox News Digital, The Wall Street Journal, Washington Examiner, CBS News, Florida Voice News, One America News Network, PJ Media, Townhall, Deseret News
