Fauci invokes Fifth Amendment for Paul's questions in Senate hearing
by Joe Fisher · UPIJuly 29 (UPI) -- Anthony Fauci is facing the Senate Homeland Security Committee in a hearing discussing COVID-19 on Wednesday and he has invoked the Fifth Amendment for Chairman Sen. Rand Paul's questions.
Fauci preemptively invoked the Fifth Amendment during his opening statement on Wednesday, citing Paul's long history of calling for him to be jailed over the handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. The former White House medical adviser said he believes Paul called the hearing to lure him into making a false statement.
"The only conclusion I can reach is 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 said. "Any reasonable person who has followed his unhinged obsession with me would readily come to the same conclusion. Therefore, although it pains me to do so because of the respect I have for the legislative branch of government and my decades-long record of cooperating with Congress, under the advice of my attorneys I will invoke my right under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution to refrain from answering your questions."
Fauci has followed through on invoking his Fifth Amendment Right as Paul began his questioning on Wednesday.
Paul released more than one thousand pages of Fauci's journals on the COVID-19 pandemic on Tuesday. In those journals, Fauci discusses the origins of the pandemic, his burgeoning fame and his relationship with President Donald Trump.
Paul wrote in a social media post over the weekend that Fauci's journals demonstrate that what he "wrote privately and what he told the country are two different stories."
Paul has long contended that the COVID-19 pandemic was caused by a leak of the virus from a research lab in Wuhan, China. In Fauci's journals he wrote that an open-air market in Wuhan, China likely amplified the spread of the virus but was not the source.
"Having said that, somewhere the virus jumped from animals to humans," Fauci wrote, adding that he believed the "jump" from animals to humans occurred naturally and was not "leaked" from a Wuhan lab.
Fauci has said publicly that he does not rule out other possible origins for the pandemic.
Other Republican senators on the committee are expected to grill Fauci on the origins of the pandemic and allegedly incongruent guidance he shared in 2020 during Wednesday's hearing. Fauci wrote about his concern over the public perception that he was "flip-flopping" theories on the virus' origin in his journal entries.