Dr. Anthony Fauci Refuses To Answer Questions During Senate Hearing, His Lawyer Is Escorted Out

Dr. Anthony Fauci was at the center of a heated Senate Hearing yesterday and his lawyer was escorted from the room when things began to unravel.

The Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee convened to ask Dr. Fauci about the COVID-19 pandemic. Senator Rand Paul was at the forefront of questioning the man who led the United States’s response to the global health crisis, resulting in the doctor invoking his Fifth Amendment right not to respond more than 100 times. 

The doctor took issue with the Committee chairman’s “obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution.” Despite that statement providing a starting point for the rest of the hearing, the Republican Senators pushed forward with their questioning. There were moments where the origins of the COVID-19 virus came up along with some claims about the National Institutes of Health’s research around the pandemic.

Dr. Fauci’s statement

The release of Fauci’s personal journal has become a flashpoint in this hearing process. However, the physician’s opening remarks during the hearing told the panel that they wouldn’t be getting any new information out of him.

Fauci said, “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 — quote — ‘behind bars.’”

“Any reasonable person who has followed his unhinged obsession with me would readily come to the same conclusion,” the doctor added. “Therefore, although it pains me to do so because of the respect I have for the legislative branch of government and my decades-long record of cooperating with Congress, under the advice of my attorneys, I will invoke my right under the 5th Amendment of the Constitution to refrain from answering your questions.”

As the hearing stretched on, frustration began to bubble over for multiple people in the room. Paul explained that he would move for a contempt vote next week, opening the door for the United States Justice Department to deliberate whether or not to formally charge Fauci with a crime.

Over the course of the two-hour hearing, Paul also ordered Fauci’s attorney, David Schertler, to leave the room after trying to argue on behalf of his client’s rights. The attorney would deliver his own statement to NBC News, saying he “has a valid Fifth Amendment privilege, and he has the right to assert it… That’s what I was trying to tell the committee, and that’s all I was trying to tell the committee.”

Schertler continued in a separate statement, “It proves the baseless and vindictive nature of this proceeding and Rand Paul’s personal vendetta against Dr. Fauci.”

(Photo Credit: The White House from Washington, DC, Public domain. Via Wikimedia Commons. Christopher Michel, CC BY-SA 4.0. Via Wikimedia Commons.)

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