MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Senate Republicans on the Homeland Security Committee voted this morning to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress. The retired public health official, you may recall, elected not to answer questions at a hearing before the panel last week, citing his Fifth Amendment rights to avoid self-incrimination. NPR congressional reporter Eric McDaniel joins me from Capitol Hill. Hey, Eric.
ERIC MCDANIEL, BYLINE: Hey.
KELLY: Hey. So walk us back, just briefly, to why senators wanted to question Fauci in the first place and why he was not inclined to answer those questions.
MCDANIEL: Yeah. So Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky has long been a critic of Fauci and says Fauci should be behind bars for his role in the federal government response to the pandemic. Fauci, who received what former President Joe Biden called a preemptive pardon in January 2025, says Paul - Fauci says Paul is, quote, "obsessed with him," and that the hearing was, in essence, an attempt to trick Fauci into perjuring himself. So Fauci refused to testify by repeatedly pleading the Fifth. Paul says he shouldn't have been afraid to answer questions, though, because of the pardon.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
RAND PAUL: The chair directed Anthony Fauci to answer. He refused again. That is what we are voting on today - not his opinions, not his policies, not anything he said from a podium six years ago. We are voting on whether a witness, who has received the benefit of a sweeping federal pardon, can be ordered by this committee to answer questions and then defy that order without consequence.
MCDANIEL: It's worth noting the pardon Fauci received doesn't cover anything after the end of Biden's term, so Fauci could have, in theory, still been charged with something like perjury.
KELLY: So what happens now?
MCDANIEL: Well, they structured this contempt of Congress vote to avoid a vote before the full Senate. It happened just in the panel. Vice President Vance, in his role as president of the Senate, can refer the charge to the Department of Justice for prosecution. Fauci's lawyer ultimately told me the vote was a political stunt and that the doctor has committed no crimes. We'll see what the DOJ chooses to do.
KELLY: Why is the Senate talking to Dr. Fauci now? He is 85 years old. He's been out of government for years at this point.
MCDANIEL: It's a good question. I mean, Senator Paul has focused specifically on the lab leak theory, which he feels like Fauci misled the public about. I admit I was surprised to see this is where Congress decided to flex its oversight muscles. Contempt of Congress is a big deal. But as Americans say, the top issues facing the country are economic issues, broadly, as well as the federal government itself. And as we've seen the executive and judicial branches flexing unprecedented power in those domains, Republican congressional leaders on other oversight questions have opted not really to flex their muscles.
KELLY: Say more about that. What do you mean?
MCDANIEL: Well, look, President Trump acted without consulting Congress to enter the war with Iran, but it's Congress that's the only branch that has the power to declare and regulate war. The administration has also moved around appropriated taxpayers' dollars for its own, you know - they assigned taxpayer dollars, and the administration moved them around without consulting them. These have a direct bearing on things like the cost of living and the function of government - things Americans rank as those big problems. There are places that Congress has the specific and constitutional authority to intervene. And while Rand Paul, himself, has supported oversight in those areas, that's not true of the Republican conference as a whole.
KELLY: NPR's Eric McDaniel on Capitol Hill. Thanks, Eric.
MCDANIEL: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
