In a scathing, foul-mouthed attack, Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) castigated Dr. Anthony Fauci and his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic during a Senate hearing Wednesday, as the nation’s former chief medical adviser sat tight-lipped, citing fears that his testimony would be used against him.
“Who the fuck do you think you were for doing that?” Moreno told Fauci, referring to his health recommendations and leadership during the global crisis under both the Donald Trump and Joe Biden administrations. “It’s a total disgrace what you did to this country.”
Moreno went on to accuse Fauci of “being more interested in being a celebrity than saving the American people.”
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“I hope that, one way or another, somewhere, sometime, you answer for your crimes,” he concluded.
Fauci, who has been a target of Republicans for years for his handling of the pandemic, looked straight ahead and did not react to the senator’s accusations.
The doctor served as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases starting in 1984 and also as chief medical adviser to the president starting in 2021. He retired in 2022.
Throughout the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing, Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to answer any of the lawmakers’ questions, arguing that he was called before Congress purposely to incriminate him and put him “behind bars,” as Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), the committee’s chair, has pledged to do.
“Any reasonable person who has followed his unhinged obsession with me would readily come to the same conclusion,” he said of Paul.
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Paul later told reporters that he would push to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress for refusing to answer senators’ questions.
“That’s a vote that will happen in committee next week,” he told reporters.
Paul and other senators attending the hearing said they believe Fauci doesn’t have the right to plead the Fifth because of a pardon he received from Biden that gives him immunity from criminal liability.
“Maybe the Fifth Amendment doesn’t attach when you have a pardon in place,” he added, while calling that a “legal question.”