A Republican-led US Senate committee has voted along party lines to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who became the public face of America's pandemic response, in contempt of Congress. The 8–5 vote follows Fauci's refusal to answer questions during a July 29 hearing of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, where he invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination more than 100 times — including in response to questions as basic as what day of the week it was or what colour tie he was wearing. Committee chairman Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, a Republican who has long accused Fauci of attempting to conceal the origins of COVID-19 and of funding research at a laboratory in Wuhan, China, said he would refer the matter directly to the Justice Department for potential criminal prosecution, bypassing the full Senate vote that would normally be required.

Fauci and his legal team justified the sweeping invocation of the Fifth Amendment by pointing to Paul's repeated public statements calling for Fauci to be imprisoned. "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 in his opening statement. His attorney, David Schertler, called Thursday's contempt vote a "crude political stunt" intended to punish Fauci for exercising a constitutionally protected right, adding that "Dr. Fauci has committed no crime — and Senator Paul knows it."

The legal picture is complicated by a broad preemptive pardon that former President Joe Biden issued Fauci on his last day in office in January 2025, covering all of Fauci's official actions between 2014 and January 19, 2025. Republicans on the committee argued this pardon removed Fauci's basis for invoking the Fifth Amendment, citing an 1896 Supreme Court precedent holding that a pardoned person cannot claim the privilege for offences already covered. Legal experts, however, caution that the issue is far from settled. The pardon does not shield Fauci from prosecution for actions taken after January 2025 — including potential contempt of Congress charges — nor does it protect him from state or local prosecution. Attorneys general in Florida, West Virginia and Louisiana have each said they are issuing Fauci subpoenas of their own. The Trump administration has also questioned the validity of Biden's pardons.

Senator Gary Peters of Michigan, the committee's senior Democrat, denounced the vote as a "rushed investigation" driven by Paul's "yearslong campaign" against Fauci and warned of a chilling effect on future congressional witnesses. Under normal Senate procedure, a contempt resolution must pass the full Senate with a 60-vote supermajority — a threshold Republicans, who hold 53 seats, cannot reach on their own. Paul circumvented this process by referring the vote directly to the Justice Department, a step legal analysts say a court would likely scrutinise closely. Should the case proceed, a grand jury would have to decide whether to indict, and a judge would then determine whether Fauci's Fifth Amendment claims were legally valid. Conviction for contempt of Congress carries a maximum sentence of one year in prison. Such convictions are rare: the last notable cases came in 2024, when former Trump advisers Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro were both sentenced to jail for contempt, the first such convictions since the 1980s.