Dr. Anthony Fauci, who led the US government response to the Covid-19 pandemic, invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, refusing to testify Wednesday just minutes into a Capitol Hill hearing that Republicans outwardly hoped would undermine the scientist and open him to claims of perjury.
Appearing before the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee after being subpoenaed by Sen. Rand Paul, Fauci cited what he characterized as the Republican chairman’s “obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution” as his reason for refusing to speak.
The move is sure to infuriate Fauci’s Republican critics, who will have been deprived of a public forum in which to relitigate his alleged mishandling of the Covid-19 response and conspiracies about the origins of the virus.
But in his opening statement, Fauci asserted 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, the face of American infectious disease research dating back to the HIV/AIDs crisis, has appeared more than 250 times before Congress, and this is the first he’s invoked the Fifth Amendment.
