A legal scholar believes that Dr. Anthony Fauci's recent appearance before the Senate Homeland Security Committee could have negatively impacted his legal situation, despite receiving a pardon from President Joe Biden. Ryan Goodman, a law professor at New York University and former special counsel for the Department of Defense, stated that Fauci's repeated invocation of the Fifth Amendment during the hearing, while potentially intended to avoid "perjury traps" from Republicans, may not shield him from contempt charges.
Goodman explained that potential crimes related to the hearing itself are not covered by Biden's blanket pardon for Fauci, which was issued on the president's final day in office in early 2025 and covers federal offenses between January 1, 2014, and January 19, 2025. "There could be - theoretically, at least - a Justice Department that goes after him for not answering when he is not really facing that criminal charge," Goodman told CNN anchor Erin Burnett.
Senator Rand Paul, the committee's chairman, has alleged that Fauci misled Congress and approved funding for experiments abroad that may have contributed to the virus's spread. Fauci has maintained that his National Institutes of Health (NIH) did not fund such research in China. During the hearing, Fauci, 85, stated that Paul's sole motivation for calling him was to elicit a statement that would lead to his incarceration.
The origins of COVID-19 remain a subject of debate, with leading theories pointing to either a laboratory incident or natural zoonotic transmission. Diary entries from Fauci, spanning from early 2020 to his retirement in 2022, reportedly indicate his own uncertainty regarding whether the virus was engineered or originated from a lab leak. Paul has specifically accused the NIH under Fauci's leadership of funding coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and alleged that Fauci misled Congress about whether this work constituted gain-of-function research.
Senator Paul echoed Goodman's sentiment, suggesting that Fauci's assertion of Fifth Amendment rights might be questionable given his immunity from criminal liability via the pardon. "We believe with his liability, his immunity from criminal liability, that he didn't need to hide behind the Fifth Amendment and that maybe the Fifth Amendment doesn't attach when you have a pardon in place," Paul commented to reporters following a vote to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress.
Goodman characterized Fauci's ability to plead the Fifth again as a "legal question." The ultimate decision on whether to pursue contempt charges and if the Department of Justice will act on them remains pending.
