‘There was no other option’: Inside Fauci’s intensely planned hearing strategy

By Adam Cancryn, Sarah Owermohle, CNN

(CNN) — Dr. Anthony Fauci arrived at a high-stakes Senate hearing on Wednesday with a single, modest goal: Survive. The former top government scientist felt he accomplished that mission, people close to Fauci told CNN.

Invoking his Fifth Amendment right to not self-incriminate more than 100 times, Fauci gave Senate Republicans a myriad of clips to share on X, but deprived them of any new opportunity to fulfill their vows to prosecute him for perjury. He refused to be drawn back into long-running battles over Covid-19 and its origins.

And instead, his allies argued, Fauci’s silence turned public scrutiny back on the lawmakers who have pursued him for years, attempting to find clear evidence that he’d mishandled the Covid crisis. In fact, some of those allies said Fauci’s unredacted Covid-era diary that Paul released days earlier — which included his unvarnished and occasionally unflattering notes on his private conversations and colleagues — may have proved more embarrassing and damaging to Fauci’s public standing than the hearing itself.

“They overplayed their hand,” said one of the people close to Fauci. “And I think the majority of the country saw it for what it was.”

The marathon hearing only seemed to intensify the six-year battle between Fauci and GOP Sen. Rand Paul, and the Kentucky senator pledged a vote next week on holding the 85-year-old scientist in contempt over his refusal to testify. But Fauci’s advisers had concluded in the lead-up to his congressional appearance that he had no other choice but to repeatedly invoke the Fifth Amendment, the people close to Fauci said, as the Trump administration has shown an eagerness to target political foes, even based on at-times flimsy evidence.

Paul and other Republicans — including US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. — had openly suggested that the hearing’s primary goal was to generate evidence for new perjury charges that wouldn’t be covered by the preemptive pardon Fauci received from then-President Joe Biden in 2025.

Fauci’s team feared that if he opted to testify, Republicans would seize on any inconsistency with his past statements as justification for those claims, no matter how small the difference.

“There was no other option,” one of the people close to Fauci said. “Rand Paul has millions of documents that he could bring up over a 50-year career. (Fauci) has nothing in front of him.”

A spokesperson for Fauci declined to comment. Paul’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

But in a sign that Fauci’s team anticipated Republicans would seek to challenge his Fifth Amendment rights, the scientists’ opening statement underwent multiple revisions to ensure he did not address his Covid-era actions in a way that would inadvertently undermine his claim against self-incrimination, one of the people familiar said.

Fauci instead used his opening statement solely to decry the hearing itself, accusing Paul of having an “unhinged obsession” with imprisoning him. And the scientist’s team purposely did not telegraph their plans to invoke the Fifth Amendment ahead of time, that person said, forcing Republicans to plan for all scenarios.

The decision to invoke his constitutional right — and Republicans’ unusual decision to continue the hearing for hours and use it as a platform to renew attacks on Fauci — has since catapulted the former top health official back into public view for the first time in three years.

Though Fauci left the government in 2023 after becoming the highly polarizing face of the government’s early Covid-19 response, he has spent much of his retirement consulting with lawyers and close advisers in an effort to fend off Republican investigations.

In the meantime, some of those around him have also faced repercussions. Fauci’s wife, Christine Grady, was among several senior health officials with links to him who were fired or reassigned as part of cuts at the National Institutes of Health overseen by Kennedy.

Another former Fauci associate, David Morens, was charged in April with concealing federal records. Morens, a career civil servant with no criminal record, was arrested by armed federal agents outfitted in tactical gear.

That episode has further fueled concerns among some Fauci allies about the push for his prosecution, said one of the people close to Fauci. They suggested that, even short of a conviction, new charges could allow Paul and other Republicans to secure a political victory: Images of Fauci in handcuffs and under arrest.

Yet it’s unclear whether Paul’s contempt gambit will further escalate potential peril for Fauci. Should the committee vote succeed, Paul would typically need to overcome a 60-vote threshold in the full Senate before the chamber could ultimately recommend criminal charges to the Department of Justice — a longshot since it would require Democratic support.

Paul has insisted that he can instead bypass that vote and send the contempt referral directly to the Justice Department, though it remains unclear whether that maneuver would pass muster.

Even then, it would be up to the federal prosecutors to decide whether to charge Fauci with contempt. President Donald Trump has been noncommittal on the subject, despite his frequent enthusiasm for using the legal system to target political foes.

Fauci allies and some legal scholars have already argued that Fauci has the right to invoke the Fifth Amendment regardless of his pardon, since he could still face state or local prosecution for his Covid-era actions or be federally charged based on any new statements he makes.

That reasoning seemed to prompt conflicting views even among the Republicans who have sought to scrutinize Fauci. While Paul maintained that he shouldn’t be shielded by the Fifth Amendment, he also said repeatedly that any testimony could be considered a “new lie” — and admitted Fauci’s protections were a “legal question that the courts may have to decide on.”

Oklahoma GOP Sen. James Lankford, meanwhile, said at one point during the hearing that it was Fauci’s “right” not to answer any questions, even as he later questioned whether the scientist retained those rights after opting to make an opening statement.

Yet among Fauci’s allies and advisers, Republicans’ continued pursuit of charges only served to justify the initial decision to sit out a hearing aimed only at plunging him deeper into legal jeopardy by any means necessary.

The hearing “was designed solely to vilify him, and there’s no way he could have answered those questions in any way that would have been productive,” said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a longtime acquaintance of Fauci.

“Of course, he did some things and said some things that were wrong because all of us at some point did or said some things that were wrong during this pandemic,” Offit said. “But Dr. Fauci was not the father of this virus, and he didn’t do anything nefariously. He was trying to get it right.”

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