Republican-led Senate panel will ask Justice Department to charge Dr. Anthony Fauci with contempt of Congress

(CNN) — Republican Sen. Rand Paul said on Thursday he will recommend that the Justice Department charge Dr. Anthony Fauci with contempt of Congress, advancing an audacious effort by GOP critics to prosecute the well-known scientist over his refusal to testify about the US government response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Paul’s office plans to hand-deliver the referral to federal authorities shortly after the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee narrowly voted along party lines to hold Fauci in contempt, arguing that he could not rely on his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination to avoid answering lawmakers’ questions.

The move sets up a high-stakes legal and political test for the Trump administration, which now must decide whether to bring charges against Fauci despite deep uncertainty over whether such a case could succeed in court.

“It doesn’t have to go to the House, doesn’t have to be signed by the president, and really doesn’t have to go before the Senate,” Paul said Thursday of his referral. The majority had voted “to refer this, so that will be accomplished today,” he said.

The 8-7 committee vote came a week after Fauci declined to answer lawmakers’ questions during a fiery hearing before the Senate committee, instead invoking his Fifth Amendment right more than 100 times.

Fauci’s refusals infuriated Republicans on the panel, who then argued that his decision opened the door to federal contempt charges — a crime that, if convicted, can carry with it a sentence of up to a year in prison.

Paul is seeking to speed through the process, bypassing a full Senate vote on contempt, in a break with longstanding precedent that some legal experts warned could undercut the government’s ability to bring charges against Fauci.

The move opens the committee to a number of options to proceed.

According to the resolution the committee passed, Vice President JD Vance, in his constitutional role as president of the Senate, would now need to sign off on circumventing the rules before the Justice Department can decide whether to prosecute.

At the same time, Paul has said he believes he can transmit his recommendation directly to Justice officials, even as he left the door open to a full Senate vote at some point in the future.

“There is some precedent for doing it that way, and it still may be done that way,” he said of the potential for a vote on the Senate floor, which would require some Democrats to join Republicans to hit the 60-vote threshold needed for passage.

Legal experts cautioned there’s little guarantee that the contempt charges will succeed, saying they will likely instead kick off a lengthy court battle over the limits of Fauci’s Fifth Amendment rights.

Democrats on the committee sought repeatedly to delay the contempt vote on Thursday, raising concerns about Paul’s plan to take his referral directly to the Justice Department and the precedent that it could set.

“Members of this committee should move to table this resolution until we can be assured by the chairman that he will not take actions that weaken the Senate’s and this committee’s ability to conduct oversight in the future,” said Sen. Gary Peters, the top Democrat on the committee.

Republicans on the panel voted down the Democrats’ efforts to derail the vote.

After the vote, Fauci’s lawyer David Schertler decried it as a “crude political stunt intended to punish Dr. Fauci for exercising his constitutional rights.”

“For years, Senator Paul has proclaimed to anyone who would listen that Dr. Fauci should be prosecuted and put in prison. Dr. Fauci has committed no crime – and Senator Paul knows it,” he said.

Paul and other Republicans have contended that Fauci could not invoke the Fifth because he’d already received a preemptive pardon from former President Joe Biden covering Covid-era actions that the committee is investigating. Republicans have long accused Fauci of lying and misrepresenting data during the Covid response, though they’ve yet to present clear evidence of such an alleged cover-up.

During Thursday’s vote, Paul said Congress needs to enact legislation to ensure a better pandemic response in the future, but “cannot determine what additional reforms are necessary until it fully understands what remains unanswered” – a process that Fauci, by refusing to address the panel, was obstructing, he argued.

“Holding a witness in contempt is a serious thing, and it should be rare,” Paul added. “The contempt power exists for precisely this circumstance.”

But GOP lawmakers also openly acknowledged in the lead-up to last week’s hearing that they hoped to get Fauci to perjure himself in his testimony, allowing them to bring new charges not covered by the pardon. Those motivations threaten to undercut their argument that Fauci should now be held in contempt for refusing to engage with them.

The Justice Department has yet to indicate whether it will investigate Fauci for contempt, saying only that it “seriously reviews all congressional referrals.” The White House did not respond to requests for comment.

The contempt vote nevertheless represents the most aggressive step in a long-running feud between Fauci and Paul.

In particular, Paul has clashed with Fauci repeatedly over the origins of the coronavirus, which the GOP lawmaker has asserted was the result of a lab leak tied to viral research in China funded by the National Institutes of Health. Fauci, who has theorized that Covid-19 likely emerged naturally, has strenuously denied that the NIH ever funded studies related to the coronavirus strain that spurred the pandemic.

In the last year, Paul also enlisted Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to aid his investigation, teaming up with the former antivaccine activist who has waged his own yearslong battle with Fauci.

Ahead of Thursday’s hearing, HHS provided a copy of Fauci’s government iPhone to Sen. Ron Johnson, who sits on the committee. Fauci used the phone during his time as director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

The move came on the heels of a Kennedy’s disclosure of Fauci’s Covid-era diary, which he handed to Paul after discovering it on his department’s servers.

The diary, which Paul published ahead of last week’s hearing, included Fauci’s unvarnished and at times unflattering descriptions of colleagues and internal debates, as well as his fascination with his own rising celebrity. But it provided little new evidence to bolster Republicans’ claims against him.

Trump and other prominent Republicans have also targeted Fauci since his 2022 retirement from government service, despite the president’s heavy reliance on him in his first term during the early stages of the pandemic — and subsequent decision just before leaving office to give Fauci one of the presidential commendations awarded for helping develop the Covid-19 vaccine.

In recent weeks, Trump has sought to distance himself from Fauci, insisting that he only briefly relied on his advice during the 2020 crisis. But so far, he’s stopped short of joining the open calls for Fauci’s prosecution.

“He was pardoned by Biden, and I respect that,” Trump said last week in response to questions about whether he would seek to invalidate Fauci’s pardon. “I know how powerful it is. It’s a very powerful ‒ they say it’s literally the most powerful thing a president has.”