Paul on bypassing full Senate on Fauci contempt resolution

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), the chair of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said he will directly refer the committee-approved resolution to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci in contempt to the Justice Department, but that he hasn't ruled out bringing it before the full Senate.

"We will forward it. It's the committee's verdict that he should be held in contempt, and it will be sent. But no one said that we won't bring it before the Senate," he told reporters. "There is some precedent for doing it that way."

The Senate panel voted 8–5, along party lines, to hold the infectious disease expert in contempt of Congress for pleading the Fifth and refusing to answer senators' questions at last week's hearing on the origins of COVID-19.

Dr. Fauci, who retired in 2022 after a decades-long run as director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told senators last week he was pleading the Fifth due to Sen. Paul's "obvious obsession" with calling for his prosecution and "repeated slanderous comments" about him.

"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,'" he told senators. "Any reasonable person who has followed his unhinged obsession with me would readily come to the same conclusion."

The extraordinarily unusual move to send the referral directly to the Justice Department without it first going before the full Senate, where it would be near-certain to fail, could undercut prosecutors' ability to bring charges against Dr. Fauci and would likely kick off a lengthy court battle over the limits of witnesses' Fifth Amendment rights.

"We will hand deliver it today to the attorney general and we will hand deliver it today to the District of Columbia, to the U.S. attorney there, and from there, we'll find out," Sen. Paul said. "But this way, we don't sit a month waiting to determine whether we bring it to the Senate floor."

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