The Senate Homeland Security Committee on Thursday approved a resolution holding Dr. Anthony S. Fauci in contempt of Congress for his refusal last week to answer questions from the panel, whose chairman, Senator Rand Paul, has said repeatedly that he wants to see Dr. Fauci in prison.
The vote, along party lines, clears the way for the committee to recommend that the Justice Department prosecute Dr. Fauci for failing to comply with a congressional subpoena, a misdemeanor under federal law. But that does not mean the department will take up the case.
For a contempt resolution to carry the force of Congress, the full Senate must adopt it; in that case, it would be sent to the U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., who could then present a case to a grand jury. But contempt resolutions require a 60-vote majority, and with 53 Republicans in the Senate, adoption is highly unlikely.
“The chair directed Anthony Fauci to answer. He refused,” Mr. Paul, a Kentucky Republican, said at the outset of Thursday’s session. “That is what we are voting on today — not his opinions, not his policies, not anything he said from the podium six years ago. We are voting on whether a witness who has received the benefit of a federal pardon can be ordered by this committee to answer questions and then defy that order without consequence.”
Senator Gary Peters of Michigan, the top Democrat on the committee, accused Mr. Paul of conducting a “rushed investigation” without Democrats’ participation. He warned that if the committee approved the resolution holding Dr. Fauci in contempt, it would discourage others from testifying in the future.
“This committee should not damage its future investigative authority to advance the chairman’s yearslong campaign against single individuals,” Mr. Peters said.
The vote followed another twist in Republicans’ investigation of Dr. Fauci. On Wednesday night, Senator Ron Johnson, the chairman of the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, said he had received a copy of Dr. Fauci’s government-issued cellphone. “Hopefully this device will address many of the questions he refused to answer at last week’s hearing,” Mr. Johnson wrote on social media.
Thursday’s vote represents only part of Dr. Fauci’s travails on Capitol Hill. Representative James R. Comer, the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, said after last week’s hearing that he would be “asking Dr. Fauci whether he stands by his previous testimony to our committee.”
Florida’s attorney general, James Uthmeier, also vowed after last week’s hearing to investigate Dr. Fauci.
Mr. Paul has accused Dr. Fauci of funding research in China that led to the coronavirus pandemic, and lying about it to Congress, accusations that Dr. Fauci has vigorously denied.
Dr. Fauci, who appeared under subpoena, invoked his Fifth Amendment right to remain silent more than 100 times in last week’s hearing, as hostile Republicans battered him with questions about matters including the origins of Covid-19 and whether he used his position to enrich himself by enlisting staff and colleagues to nominate him for cash awards.
Dr. Fauci received a “pre-emptive pardon” from former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. but it covers only his activities from 2014 through Jan. 19, 2025, Mr. Biden’s last full day in office. His allies said that if he testified and made a misstep, he would open himself up to possible perjury charges. Republicans on the panel said the pardon protects him so he was ineligible to take the Fifth.
On this issue, legal scholars disagree. Some said his invocation of the Fifth was proper because he was legally vulnerable. Others said the pardon offers him immunity.
Republicans on the homeland security panel said that Dr. Fauci, who made a short statement before invoking his Fifth Amendment right, cannot both testify and refuse to testify at the same time.
There is precedent for Congress holding a government official in contempt for invoking the Fifth Amendment after initially testifying. In 2013, Lois Lerner, an Internal Revenue Service official, appeared before a House committee under subpoena and insisted she had not misled Congress in previous testimony.
Like Dr. Fauci, she then refused to answer questions. Ms. Lerner was promptly suspended from her job, and in 2014, the House voted along party lines to hold her in contempt of Congress. But in 2015, federal prosecutors refused to prosecute her, saying they did not agree with House Republicans who said that by making her initial statement, Ms. Lerner had waived her Fifth Amendment right.
Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma, who was the sole Republican to question Dr. Fauci gently at last week’s hearing, raised the Lerner case at the end of the session, suggesting that the homeland security panel needed to at least consider having a contempt vote.
“The parliamentary question that I think we’ve got to be able to deal with is: Is this consistent with Lois Lerner?” Mr. Lankford asked.
Two advisers to President Trump who served in his first administration, Stephen K. Bannon and Peter Navarro, each spent four months in prison in 2024 for failing to comply with congressional subpoenas. But rather than invoke the Fifth Amendment, Mr. Navarro and Mr. Bannon simply did not show up to testify.
Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee and a former constitutional law professor, said that Mr. Paul has already tainted a prosecution by asserting he wanted to see Dr. Fauci in prison, while at the same time trying to force him to testify.
“I do have some sense of the ethics of a legislative investigation,” Mr. Raskin said. “It just would never occur to me to go around saying a witness should be in prison and then try to prevent them from invoking their Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination over the very matter I’m claiming is criminal.”
Thursday’s vote was the culmination of a yearslong battle between Mr. Paul and Dr. Fauci, who served for nearly 40 years as the government’s top infectious disease expert and was well-regarded by both parties until the coronavirus pandemic turned him into a symbol of government lockdowns.
Mr. Paul has zeroed in on whether Dr. Fauci knew the pandemic started in a laboratory and misled the public and Congress about it. There is no proof of that. Dr. Fauci has said repeatedly that he is open to the idea of a lab leak but he believes the pandemic was natural in origin.
Dr. Fauci, 85, did not help his own cause by keeping a personal journal on a government computer, in which he chronicled not only the pandemic response but also his own media appearances and friendships with celebrities.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gave the journal to Mr. Paul, who made more than 1,100 pages of it public in the run-up to last week’s hearing. Republicans used it to portray Dr. Fauci as a self-absorbed narcissist, as his admirers noted that he is hardly the only official in Washington to have a big ego.
