Pardoned due to Covid, tried for silence: Fauci hid behind the Fifth Amendment 111 times

The former head of the American Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Anthony Fauci, came to the US Senate — and was silent for an hour and a half. 111 times in a row he invoked the right not to incriminate himself, refusing to even explain what day of the week it was. The senators responded by promising him not prison for COVID, but prosecution for his silence itself.

Table of contents:

• Hour of shame or hour of protection
• Pardon against the Fifth Amendment: in what is the legal trap
• The two charges that started it all
• Reaction: from the “monster” to the predicted scenario
• What's next
• Why is this important not only for Americans

Hour of shame or hour of defense

On Wednesday, July 29, 85-year-old Anthony Fauci appeared at a hearing of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee — not of his own free will, but on a subpoena from the committee chairman, Republican Senator Rand Paul. It was Paul who this week released 1,141 pages of Fauci's personal diary entries from 2019-2022, saying they «completely undermine the official version of events,» xrust notes.

Fauci responded to the publication in a mirror way: he called Paul’s campaign against himself “insane” and accused the senator of trying to force him to say something that would retroactively justify public promises to put him in prison.

Then began what the American press has already dubbed “one of the most one-sided hearings of the year.” To every question — from the Wuhan laboratory to the mask regime — Fauci answered with the same phrase: on the advice of his lawyers, he was exercising his right guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution and refraining from answering. In two and a half hours this was repeated 111 times.

The climax of the absurdity came when Republican Senator Josh Hawley asked the former official what day of the week it was and what color tie he was wearing. Fauci chose not to answer this directly. Ohio Senator Bernie Moreno took a different path — instead of everyday trifles, he asked over and over again whether Fauci was ready to apologize to specific groups of Americans who, according to Moreno, suffered from quarantine measures, lockdowns and vaccination recommendations. The answer was predictable — the same refusal.

For a man who headed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) for nearly four decades—under presidents of both parties—and became the leading public face of the pandemic in the United States, such muteness seemed almost surreal. Just a few years ago, Fauci appeared daily at White House briefings, commenting on every outbreak and every new wave of coronavirus. Now the same person could not even confirm the day of the week to the senators.

Pardon against the Fifth Amendment: what is the legal trap

This is where the main intrigue of the story begins — and on it, American sources disagreed more than in the assessment of Fauci himself.

Back on January 19, 2025, the last day of his term, President Joe Biden issued a preventive pardon to Fauci in case of “unfounded and politically motivated prosecution” for his actions during the pandemic. On paper, this should have closed the issue once and for all.

But pardon only protects against old sins, not new ones. Federal law specifically makes it a crime to intentionally lie to Congress—and that's what Fauci now faces if he testifies and it turns out to be inaccurate.

Republicans consider the very logic of the defense questionable. Their argument builds on an 1896 U.S. Supreme Court decision: If a witness is immune from prosecution based on the content of his testimony, he cannot invoke the Fifth Amendment—the very reason for silence disappears along with the risk. Rand Paul formulated this more harshly: once a person has already received immunity, there can be no self-incrimination — unless, of course, he is going to lie.

Fox News legal commentator Kerry Urban admitted: the conflict is real. A pardon could protect Fauci from the past, but it does not address the question of what will happen if the committee does vote to hold him accountable for contempt of Congress, a vote Paul has scheduled for next week.

The 1896 precedent cited by Republicans is a well-known case in the American legal tradition about the power of Congress to compel witnesses to testify in exchange for immunity from prosecution for the content of what is said. The logic is simple: if the state guarantees in advance that words will not be used against a person, he has no legal grounds to hide behind the formula “I don’t want to incriminate myself” — unless he is going to lie under oath, and this is a completely different article.

Democrat Gary Peters, the committee's leading minority member, saw it differently: an attempt to «legitimize a predetermined conclusion» that Republicans had reached long before the hearings. According to his version, the hearing itself was initially structured not as a search for the truth, but as a public execution with a previously known verdict.

Two charges that started it all

Paul's claims against Fauci were not born yesterday — he has been making them for years, and they come down to two points.

First: lies about research funding in Wuhan. According to Paul, the US National Institutes of Health, through Fauci’s structures, financed experiments on “enhancing the functions” of pathogens — that is, modifying viruses to study their potential danger — at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Fauci himself has insisted for years that what was funded did not fall within the official government definition of “feature enhancement.” The dispute is largely terminological, but it is precisely on this that the charge of perjury rests.

Second: concealing the origin of the virus. This adds a fresh detail that the Russian media has so far avoided: shortly before the hearing, Rand Paul published a correspondence on Slack, from which, according to him, it follows that the authors of a key scientific article on the natural origin of COVID-19 privately doubted their own conclusions — despite the fact that they publicly defended the version of the virus passing from animals to humans.

The origin of the virus, by the way, has not yet been officially established. The FBI said in 2023 that a lab leak was most likely; The CIA in January 2025 joined this version, but with a low degree of confidence; four more US intelligence agencies are leaning towards natural origin.

Another figure also managed to get involved in the case—ex-Director of US National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. Shortly before leaving her post, she declassified documents that, according to her, confirm Fauci’s connection with the financing of the study of dangerous mutations of the coronavirus in the Wuhan laboratory, and at the same time indicate attempts to adjust the conclusions of the intelligence community in a direction convenient for themselves. It is these documents, along with the diary and slack correspondence, that Republicans are now collecting into a single dossier — and that is why the vote on contempt of Congress is not scheduled in the abstract, but for a specific date next week.

Reaction: from the “monster” to the predicted scenario

Fauci's silence has caused as much emotion among his opponents as a frank admission would have caused among his supporters.

Florida Republican Congressman Jimmy Patronis called Fauci a “monster” and his invocation of the Fifth Amendment “disgusting.” Investigative journalist Gerald Posner reminded us that the right to silence exists to protect the innocent from government abuses, not to hide from the truth. White House adviser Peter Navarro said that he predicted such an outcome in the morning of the same day.

Former President Donald Trump, under whom Fauci once served as chief medical adviser to combat the pandemic, reacted briefly on social networks and in his recognizable manner: he called Fauci’s ideas “CRAZY” even before the hearings began.

There was also a physical incident: when one of Fauci's lawyers, David Schertler, tried to intervene in cross-examination without permission, the chairman of the committee ordered him to be removed from the chamber by the Capitol Police. Schertler himself, after the hearing, called the prosecution of his client “obsessive revenge” and promised to “consider all options” to protect his client.

It is significant that even on the side of Fauci’s critics there was not complete unity in assessing what was happening. Some commentators focused on the very fact of silence as a moral defeat for the former official, while others, like Fox columnist Kerry Urban, preferred to talk specifically about legal uncertainty, without giving moral assessments in advance. This discrepancy is important in itself: it shows that even Trump-friendly audiences are split not over Fauci's guilt, but over the legality of the procedure itself.

What's next

The story clearly did not end on Wednesday evening. After the hearing itself, Florida Attorney General James Utmyer announced the opening of his own investigation into Fauci, parallel to the federal trial in the Senate. A committee vote on whether to prosecute the former official for contempt of Congress is scheduled for next week.

In parallel, as if to confirm the seriousness of Washington’s intentions regarding the topic of “dangerous” viral research, the Trump administration on Tuesday — that is, on the eve of the hearing — signed an order prohibiting federal funding for work aimed at “dangerous enhancement of functions” of genes. The timing is hardly accidental.

Why is this important not only for Americans

For the Russian reader, this story is not just an overseas political circus. It exposes a systemic problem, familiar in other countries: how to combine an official’s right to protection with the public demand for responsibility for decisions that cost lives. In the United States, more than 1.1 million people have officially died from COVID-19 — and the question of who and why made decisions about lockdowns, masks and vaccinations, six years later, is still not closed, either legally or morally.

Another thing is indicative: the dispute is not so much about the facts of the pandemic — they have been studied for a long time — but about trust in experts in general. And in this sense, the American Fauci case is a warning for any country where a scientific position is quickly turning into a political weapon.

There is also a practical lesson for those who observe American politics from the outside: the institution of pardon, which in Russia is perceived as an almost absolute guarantee of immunity, in the United States turns out to be a much narrower instrument. A pardon covers specific, already committed acts — but does not give immunity for the future and certainly does not relieve one from the obligation to tell the truth before legislators. For a person publicly pardoned by the head of state, this sounds paradoxical: the louder you are forgiven, the more vulnerable you become to any new word spoken under oath.

No less indicative is the speed with which new institutions are getting involved. Less than 24 hours after the hearing, Florida prosecutors opened their own investigation into Fauci, parallel to the federal trial in the Senate. In a system where individual states have broad legal autonomy, this is common practice: a political scandal at the federal level almost inevitably spawns regional proceedings, each of which has its own interpretation of the same facts.

For now, the only thing that can be said with confidence: they didn’t put an end to Fauci’s story on Wednesday—they just started writing it all over again.

Sources:

1. Reuters — https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/fauci-face-rand-pauls-us-senate-committee-after-diary-release-2026-07-29/
2. Fox News — https://www.foxnews.com/politics/fauci-repeatedly-pleads-fifth-fiery-showdown-rand-paul.amp
3. The Washington Post — https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/07/29/fauci-set-face-rand-paul-senate-gop-after-release-his-covid-diary/

Xrust Pardoned due to Covid, tried for silence: Fauci hid behind the Fifth Amendment 111 times