A Senate panel investigating Dr. Anthony Fauci has reportedly obtained a copy of the cellphone he used during the COVID-19 pandemic ahead of a key committee vote Thursday to hold him in contempt of Congress.
The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that the Department of Health and Human Services, which is led by Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr, transferred a copy of the phone’s records to the Senate Homeland Security Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.
Fauci used the phone during his tenure as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, according to The Journal, which also revealed that Sens. Ron Johnson (R-WI) and Rand Paul (R-KY) have obtained “millions of additional Fauci-related pages” from government servers.
On Wednesday, The Daily Wire interviewed Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Rand Paul, whose release of Fauci’s private diaries helped set the stage for an explosive Capitol Hill hearing where Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times.
“Historically, votes like this have gone to the full Senate, but I think there’s no absolute rule that says we can’t send it directly to the Department of Justice,” Paul said. “So my plan is that if we win the vote on Thursday, to immediately send it to the Department of Justice with a recommendation for prosecution, even if it passes the whole Senate.”
Paul’s office sent two criminal referrals to the Biden Justice Department, the senator said, and two more under President Donald Trump’s administration.
“This will be the first time that our entire committee or the majority of our committee sends it,” he noted. “So we’ll see what happens. We’ll discuss with [Senate Majority Leader John] Thune whether or not he thinks he can get the votes to do it on the floor.”
A floor vote would require 60 votes to pass, meaning Democrats would have to cooperate. Last week, Thune said that Fauci’s answers were “completely inadequate” and that the floor vote was “certainly an option that ought to be available to us.”
Paul told The Daily Wire that he does not expect Democrats to support a contempt vote and that he wants the Justice Department to prosecute Fauci for contempt of Congress. He plans to send the DOJ a legal brief arguing that Fauci could not invoke the Fifth Amendment because President Joe Biden’s pardon eliminated any risk of self-incrimination, leaving him with only an obligation to answer truthfully.
Statutory penalties for contempt of Congress, a federal misdemeanor, carry fines between $100 and $100,000 and a mandatory sentence of one to 12 months in prison.
“This is an important case because I think a lot of people anticipate that President Trump is going to issue similar pardons to many people in his administration who will end up being called before Congress, and the precedent here is important,” Mark Osler, a law professor and pardon power expert, told the Associated Press.
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