After infuriating Donald Trump by throwing out the Reflecting Pool vandalism case, MAGA prosecutor Jeanine Pirro now faces another politically explosive test: whether to prosecute Dr. Anthony Fauci for criminal contempt.
Senate Republicans voted Thursday to hold the former COVID adviser in contempt of Congress for refusing to answer questions about the origins of the pandemic, marking the GOP’s latest attempt to jail the 85-year-old.
The matter will now be referred to the Justice Department, where Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, must decide whether to prosecute.
The move sets up another challenge for the embattled former Fox host, who Trump came close to firing this week after she refused to back his claims that vandals ruined the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.
“I was disappointed with Jeanine Pirro. Really disappointed with Jeanine Pirro,” Trump fumed to reporters before the pair reportedly “had it out” in the Oval Office on Monday.
“She folded like an umbrella.”
Thursday’s vote came after Fauci appeared before the Senate Homeland Security Committee after being subpoenaed by Republicans, who have spent years targeting and vilifying him.
He invoked his Fifth Amendment rights—but not before he went scorched earth on GOP members and accused committee chairman Rand Paul of being obsessed and unhinged.
“Given Senator Paul’s obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution, his repeated slanderous comments about me, and recently his publicly releasing my unredacted personal diary aimed at embarrassing and intimidating me, 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.”
The showdown on Capitol Hill came after Paul released over 1,100 pages of Fauci’s personal diary entries ahead of the grilling, detailing his daily life between December 2019 and December 2022 when he retired from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
But among other things, the secret diary exposed the hypocrisy of some MAGA Republicans.
For instance, it revealed how Fauci calmed Stephen Miller’s wife Katie when she tested positive for COVID while only 10 weeks pregnant with her first child, and gave her husband advice on what to do for both their safety. Both have publicly called for him to be jailed.
Democrats on Thursday had unsuccessfully tried to delay the contempt vote, with a series of procedural motions.
Michigan Senator Gary Stevens argued that the full Senate, not just the committee, should determine whether a witness should be in contempt.
New Hampshire Senator Maggie Hassan sought a delay so the committee could hear testimony from outside legal experts on the constitutional and procedural questions surrounding the case.
And Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal also urged the vote to be postponed so the committee could hear from Fauci’s lawyer, who was ejected from the hearing when Fauci appeared last week.
He said parts of the hearing were “worse than the darkest days of the McCarthy era.”
“There is virtually no chance that a court would actually approve any contempt because he had a well-founded fear of self-incrimination, which entitled him to invoke the Fifth Amendment and to hear from his counsel,” Blumenthal said.
