Anthony Fauci spent 54 years in government service. This morning, Republicans voted to refer him for prosecution.
He walked into the National Institutes of Health in 1968 and never left. He ran the infectious disease institute for 38 years and advised seven presidents, starting with Ronald Reagan. AIDS. Anthrax. West Nile. Ebola. Zika.
Then came 2020, and a virus that killed roughly 1.2 million Americans, and a man on television every night telling a frightened country what to do.
By 2021, Rand Paul was accusing him of lying to Congress about the origins of the pandemic.
“I have not lied before the Congress,” Fauci told him at the time. “Senator Paul, you do not know what you are talking about, quite frankly.”
Paul never stopped. He called for Fauci to be fired, then arrested. He put him on the cover of his book and in his fundraising emails. He demanded the government cancel Fauci’s security detail, at a time when Fauci and his family were receiving credible death threats. In 2024, Fauci testified that the threats were still coming and that he needed round-the-clock protection.
In January 2025, Trump cancelled the detail.
And then they subpoenaed him.
Last week Fauci sat in front of Paul’s committee and invoked the Fifth Amendment 111 times over three hours. He explained why in his opening statement. Paul, he said, was trying to “get me to say something, anything, that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, ‘behind bars.'”
One of his attorneys was escorted out of the room.
This morning the committee voted 8 to 5, straight down party lines, with two more Democrats opposed by proxy.
Paul is skipping the full Senate, where contempt needs 60 votes and Republicans hold 53. He told CBS News he’ll send the referral straight to the Justice Department, and admitted there “might not be” a point to a floor vote at all.
Sen. James Lankford offered a precedent: the House held IRS official Lois Lerner in contempt in 2014 for taking the Fifth after giving an opening statement. He left out the ending. The Justice Department reviewed that reasoning, rejected it, and declined to prosecute.
The referral goes to the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. That’s Jeanine Pirro, the prosecutor Trump spent last week publicly savaging for dropping a case he wanted, saying she “choked” and “folded like an umbrella.”
“Dr. Fauci has committed no crime — and Senator Paul knows it,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal said.
There was a time Republicans said something else about this man. In 2008, a Republican president hung the Presidential Medal of Freedom around his neck. The honor was for designing PEPFAR, the AIDS relief program the State Department credits with saving more than 20 million lives. The citation honored someone who had “dedicated his life to expanding the horizons of human knowledge.”
That president was George W. Bush.
He is 85 years old now. This morning a Senate committee asked the Justice Department to punish him for using the Fifth Amendment.
Using a right is not a crime. That’s what makes it a right.