The Senate committee voted along party lines to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress and referred the matter to the Justice Department for possible criminal prosecution. The vote followed Fauci’s decision to invoke his Fifth Amendment right more than 100 times during a hearing focused on his conduct as the country’s top infectious-disease specialist during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Fauci, the 85-year-old retired former White House chief medical adviser and longtime director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, used his opening statement to address Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, the Republican committee chairman who has led the investigation into Fauci’s pandemic-era actions.

“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 told the committee. “Any reasonable person who has followed his unhinged obsession with me would readily come to the same conclusion.”

Paul has long accused Fauci of funding research in China that began the pandemic and of lying about it. Fauci has denied those allegations. In the weeks before the hearing, Paul released more than a thousand pages of Fauci’s private diary entries from the pandemic period, pointing to what Republicans described as inconsistencies between his private beliefs and his public guidance.

Legal experts offered assessments of Fauci’s decision to invoke the Fifth Amendment. Michael Gerhardt, a University of North Carolina law professor, told PBS that Fauci “knew the point of the hearing was to find a basis to prosecute him” and “found the safest way to minimize that from happening.”

A pre-emptive pardon issued by former President Joe Biden before leaving office in early 2025 covered Fauci’s actions from 2014 through January 2025, but it does not extend to actions after that date nor to state or local prosecution.

The contempt referral advances a yearslong effort by Republican lawmakers and conservative media figures to hold Fauci accountable for his pandemic-era guidance. As early as 2021, Republican senators and members of Congress called for his firing based on the release of his emails. Fauci and his family received repeated death threats that he described as credible.

Steve Bannon’s podcast was removed from Twitter/X before the platform’s acquisition by Elon Musk after Bannon called for Fauci’s beheading, saying of Fauci and former FBI Director Christopher Wray: “I’d put the heads on pikes.” A Bannon representative said the comments were metaphorical.

Not all criticism of Fauci has come from the political right. The academic Zeynep Tufekci wrote in 2024 that the government’s shifting pandemic guidance and failures of transparency by officials, including Fauci, may have undermined public trust at a crucial moment. “Just when it was needed most, some of the officials in charge of our Covid response undermined it,” Tufekci wrote.

Fauci is not the only prominent public figure to invoke the Fifth Amendment. President Donald Trump invoked it more than 400 times during a 2022 civil deposition conducted by the New York attorney general’s office during its fraud investigation into the Trump Organization’s business practices.

The contempt vote follows the committee’s earlier scheduling of the proceedings, as previously reported.