How long can Anthony Fauci stay silent? | About That

It is illegal to obstruct the work of the United States Congress.So when Anthony Fauci repeatedly says this to a group of senators.

I will invoke my right under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution to refrain from answering your questions.

And says that 111 times over the course of several hours, refusing to answer every question he was asked last week.

Well, nothing says honesty like taking the fifth, huh, Doc?Let's try something.What day of the week is it today?What color tie are you wearing?What color is the carpet in front of you?

On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.

Super awkward, but is it illegal?

There will be repercussions to your refusal to testify today.

This is about contempt.Contempt for this body and contempt for the American people.

Some breaking news this morning.The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee has voted to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress.

Republicans under Donald Trump have declared fresh war on the man who, basically overnight, was suddenly the most influential and prominent public health voice during the pandemic.Now, he won't tell them a thing.How long can he keep that up?Who the f*** do you think you were for doing that?Many Republicans and their supporters do not like Anthony Fauci, but few have so consistently made an enemy of him over such a long period of time as Rand Paul.

Instead of an apology, you have for years avoided responsibility.You did not tell the American people the full story.

Rand Paul is the Republican chair of a Senate Homeland Security committee that subpoenaed Anthony Fauci to testify just last week over I would say two main questions that even all these years after the pandemic he still feels are unanswered.One, did Fauci try to push this idea that COVID couldn't have come from a Chinese lab even when he thought maybe it did?And two, did Fauci lie about whether the U .S.gave money to create this virus that would ultimately kill more than a million Americans?Fauci denies these claims.

And here was one of the only things he said at his hearing last week.

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, quote, behind bars, unquote.Any reasonable person who has followed his unhinged obsession with me would readily come to the same conclusion.

And so it began.

Can you explain to the committee why you chose to fund this dangerous research in China?On the advice of counsel, I respectfully declined to answer.Dr. Fauci, did the CIA ever transfer funds to NIH under an interagency agreement?Dr. Fauci, were the scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology capable of inserting a furin cleavage site into a coronavirus.Lab investigators, did they ever appear in these labs to make sure they were safe labs?

On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline.And you get the idea.

The Republicans are accusing Dr. Fauci of being in contempt of Congress because he refused to answer questions and he invoked his Fifth Amendment privilege.And the Republicans are saying you can't do that because you've been given a pardon by President Biden, which covers Europe.culpability, and you are not allowed to invoke the Fifth.

Yes.Ordinarily, an American's Fifth Amendment right is to remain silent, to avoid self -incrimination.And you can do that by not answering questions.Except Republicans say, hang on, Joe Biden, when he was president, gave you a preemptive pardon.

Breaking news.President Joe Biden announcing pardons in his final hours before Donald Trump takes office.Biden announcing the pardon of Dr. Anthony Fauci.

So you're immune to prosecution, meaning you can't invoke the right to remain silent since there's no chance of self -incrimination, since there's no chance of prosecution.You don't have any rights under the Fifth Amendment because you've been pardoned, as you very well know.So to avoid questioning in this way, this, they say, is contempt.punishable by a fine of up to $100 ,000 and or up to a year in jail.

We're voting 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.

So that's why and how Fauci is under legal threat today.But the bigger question is the bigger threat beyond today.If you're someone who sees Anthony Fauci as dangerous, as a villain, the first question you have is a very serious charge.Why peddle the lie that COVID made a natural jump from animals to humans?

Publicly, Anthony Fauci promoted the theory that the virus arose naturally, while privately, he was well aware of a mountain of evidence suggesting the virus originated in the lab.

They point to Fauci's own diary entries written in the earliest days of the pandemic, like this one.January 26, 2020.So this is before the World Health Organization is even willing to call this an international public health emergency, never mind an actual pandemic, which would come months later.Fauci writes about the wet market origin theory.Now we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier.And just five days later, he writes how his colleagues studying the coronavirus itself believe mutations in its makeup could not have occurred naturally.

And they raise the possibility that these features were deliberately inserted and either accidentally released or deliberately released by a crazy person in the lab.Republicans like Rand Paul say this is evidence that Fauci and his colleagues were privately entertaining this lab leak theory while denying it in public.Fauci says that's not quite right, that he's often leaned one way but never lied.

We keep a completely open mind as to what the origin is.Having said that, if you look at the examination, by highly qualified international scientists with no political agendas.They've published in peer -reviewed journals, the best of the peer -reviewed journals, that the evidence is quite strong that this is a natural occurrence.

Fauci has said his objection was always only against people who said the lab leak theory was unequivocally true, when they just had no way of knowing.and that when people accuse him of a cover -up pointing at positions like this, published in May of 2020, they're really just misrepresenting his position as being entirely one -sided.In reality, though, opinion on the true origin of COVID -19 is split.Early on, the prevailing theory was that this was most likely a case of natural animal -to -humanat a seafood market in Wuhan, China.And for years, the U .

S.intelligence community was unsure.From this government report in 2023, at least five intelligence agencies believed this was just a case of the virus evolving from infecting animals to infecting humans.But the Department of Energy and the FBI leaned towards the Lab League theory.The CIA decided inconclusive.Though later on, it would lean more towards COVID's origin being in a lab.

The World Health Organization?Not so sure.The work to understand the origins of SARS -CoV -2 remains unfinished.The origins of SARS -CoV -2 and how it entered the human population will remain inconclusive.Despite all this, Republicans insist a Fauci cover -up makes sense.Because American taxpayer money, under Fauci's leadership, funded some of the work going on in that lab in Wuhan.

The decision to fund dangerous gain -of -function research in Wuhan, China will likely go down in history as perhaps one of the worst public health decisions.I hope today Dr. Fauci will come clean.Admit that the risk of this dangerous research exceeded any possible benefits.Ask forgiveness.

Now, at the risk of going down all the rabbit holes, I will answer this.Did Fauci's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases fund coronavirus research in Wuhan?Yes, it did.This is not disputed.A U .S.

nonprofit called EcoHealth managed to secure, over a period of about 10 years, a series of seven grants from NIAID, totaling more than $4 million, studying very specifically the question of bats transmitting coronaviruses to humans in China.A portion of this money, about $600 ,000, did go.to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.But the harder question to answer is whether that research funded an explicit attempt to make one of these coronaviruses better at infecting humans.When you hear people talking about gain -of -function research, that's what they're talking about.

in the Wuhan Institute.

Fauci has long maintained that U .S.-funded research in China did not produce anything genetically close enough to be the direct cause of the pandemic.But again, the Republican charge here is immense, which is that if the U .S.government, under Fauci's leadership, had not helped China in its research, the global pandemic might never have happened to begin with.

You've never admitted that it could have been a mistake funding this research in China.No scientist is above scrutiny.

So here's the thing.I'm not explaining and reopening this whole who caused the pandemic debate to try to come to some sort of conclusion on the matter.I raise it only to show you how high the stakes are and how serious some elements of this Trump administration are about prosecuting Anthony Fauci, pardon or no pardon.

It's very clear from statements that were made by Republicans during the hearings and after and outside of those hearings that they intend to use him as a poster child for what took place in the United States during the COVID era.

This possibility that vengeful Republicans will find some way, any way, to prosecute Fauci despite his pardon?

Senator Paul, you do not know what you are talking about, quite frankly, and I want to sayofficially.You do not know what you are talking about.And if anybody is lying here, Senator, it is you.

This is what powers Fauci's Fifth Amendment defense.While the pardon would appear to protect him from any of his public actions over a fairly wide 10 -year period, it doesn't extend to anything he might say or admit to now.And sure enough, prosecutors in Trump -friendly parts of the country at the state level, from Alabama to Florida, another red state, and Louisiana too, there is an increasing tide of legal action building against Fauci.When summoned before Congress, he shuts down.But for how long he can continue that strategy depends entirely on how determined this administration is to make him pay.