In the Senate today, a vote to hold Anthony Fauci is scheduled for 8.30am ET in the homeland security and governmental affairs committee.
The Republican chair, senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, is hoping the panel’s GOP majority will vote in favor of the resolution, after Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (Niaid), consistently invoked the fifth during a rancorous hearing last week.
However, to guarantee holding Fauci in contempt of Congress, Paul will need 60 votes in the upper chamber before sending a criminal referral to the Department of Justice.
Key events
Democratic senator Maggie Hassan, of New Hampshire, said while there is a “real need” for a “serious bipartisan examination into what went well and what went wrong during our country’s response to the pandemic”, last week’s hearing was ultimately designed to “target a single doctor and dedicated public servant, who has testified before Congress many times before, and they wanted to blame him for everything that went wrong during the pandemic”.
She also defended Fauci’s decision to pleas the fifth amendment, adding that he had “little choice but to invoke his constitutional right to not walk directly into a trap”.
During his opening remarks in today’s hearing, Republican Senator Rand Paul insisted that the vote to hold Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress was not about his “opinions”, “policies” or “anything he said from a podium six years ago”.
“We are voting on whether a witness who has received the benefit of a sweeping federal pardon can be ordered by this committee to answer questions and then defy that order without consequence,” Paul said.
A reminder that even though Fauci received a presidential pardon as Joe Biden left office, anything the former public health official says after 19 January 2025 could expose him to certain perjury charges that Paul has pursued. As a result, Fauci invoked the fifth amendment 111 times throughout last week’s questioning from lawmakers.
My colleague Jessica Glenza reports that there is debate among experts about how far the fifth amendment extends. Some argue that once a person accepts a presidential pardon, they cannot invoke the fifth amendment for federal crimes. Without that right, Congress could hold a witness in contempt, which can lead to fines or – in the extreme – jail time. Others have argued that the right extends as long as there is a valid threat of prosecution, particularly by states.
In the Senate today, a vote to hold Anthony Fauci is scheduled for 8.30am ET in the homeland security and governmental affairs committee.
The Republican chair, senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, is hoping the panel’s GOP majority will vote in favor of the resolution, after Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (Niaid), consistently invoked the fifth during a rancorous hearing last week.
However, to guarantee holding Fauci in contempt of Congress, Paul will need 60 votes in the upper chamber before sending a criminal referral to the Department of Justice.
Donald Trump is in Washington today, and will spend most of the day in meetings that are closed to the press. Later, at 7pm ET he’ll hold a reception the Rose Garden for Team USA. We’ll bring you the latest lines as that gets under way.
Exclusive: Emails reveal Palmer Luckey’s political fundraising as his company wins sole-source contracts
Aram Roston
Wealthy Republicans on the west coast received an emailed invitation in July to an upcoming fundraiser titled “Keep the Senate”. The email, obtained by the Guardian, described the event as a “private roundtable and dinner with the National Republican Senatorial Committee” where donors can pledge $50,000 for seats at the head table, and mingle with legislative heavy hitters from Capitol Hill including the Senator majority leader, John Thune, and Mike Rogers, who is running for Senate in Michigan with Donald Trump’s endorsement.
One of the organizers listed on the invite was defense industry tycoon Palmer Luckey, the 33-year-old co-founder of sprawling weapons manufacturer Anduril Industries.
The invitation is one of dozens of emails obtained by the Guardian that unravel Luckey’s vast Maga political fundraising over the last seven years.
A longtime GOP donor and activist who spoke on condition he not be identified in order to preserve his political relationships said Luckey is now the “godfather of Republican fundraising on the west coast”.
“If you’re raising campaign money in California, you have to go to Palmer Luckey,” he said. “Luckey is the top tier. There are others who are important below him but no one at his level.”
Top Democrats accuse Trump officials over Israeli settlers’ ‘unbridled violence’
David Smith
Senior Democrats have accused Donald Trump’s administration of giving a green light to violent Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank, warning that its policies created “a climate of impunity and unbridled violence” that endangers both Palestinians and US citizens.
In a letter seen by the Guardian, a group of 19 Democratic senators and representatives call for the restoration of sanctions against extremist settlers and demand independent US investigations into the deaths of nine US citizens killed in the West Bank since 2022.
The letter, signed by Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren among others, is addressed to Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, and Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary.
It argues that Trump’s promise last year that “I will not allow Israel to annex the West Bank” has been undermined by events on the ground. “In practice,” the Democrats write, “violent settlers and the [Benjamin] Netanyahu government have proceeded to rapidly extend Israeli control over civilian populations in the region.”
More here:
Why making Anthony Fauci the enemy will harm US public health for years
Melody Schreiber
Katie Miller, an erstwhile Trump administration official and wife of Stephen Miller, once relied on Dr Anthony Fauci to get through Covid. Now, she’s calling for his imprisonment – a reversal that illuminates the politicization of Fauci and of public health writ large, a trend that could have major repercussions for America’s preparedness for future crises.
A US Senate committee will vote on Thursday morning over whether to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress after the physician and former public health official invoked his fifth amendment rights during a Senate hearing last week focused on Fauci’s actions during the Covid pandemic.
The invocation of the worst days of the Covid pandemic come as midterms loom and the administration struggles to address several infectious outbreaks, including cyclosporiasis and Ebola.
Rand Paul, a senator, released contemporaneous notes that Fauci took during his time in public office, which Paul called Fauci’s diary, that reveal the confusion and fear of the time and illuminate the private episodes of a man who became known as America’s doctor.
“By focusing entirely on one human being and by calling him all sorts of names, including ‘evil’, and by calling for him to be jailed, it abdicates Republicans’ own responsibility in the US response to the pandemic, which was under President Trump,” said Gavin Yamey, director of the Center for Policy Impact in Global Health at Duke University. “I think that this is all aimed at riling up the base ahead of the midterms and at washing their hands of any culpability themselves in the mass death event of Covid.”
And it comes after substantial cuts to the public health infrastructure; misinformation has spread at the highest levels of the government, and growing outbreaks of measles, whooping cough, cyclosporiasis, Ebola, and more.
“This is an extraordinarily good way to distract people from the very deliberate destruction of the US public health system,” Yamey said.
Senators set to vote on holding Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress
Hello and welcome to our live coverage of US politics.
The Senate is expected to vote today on whether to hold Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress.
Fauci, a key adviser to Donald Trump and Joe Biden during the Covid-19 pandemic, had invoked the fifth amendment and refused to answer questions at a high-profile Senate committee hearing on the origins of Covid-19.
The hearing had been called by Republican senator Rand Paul, who has investigated Fauci for years – and who Fauci accused of having an “unhinged obsession” with him. Ahead of the hearing, Paul released what he described as Fauci’s “diary”, in which he described Trump as “rambling”, “crazy”, “desperate”, “bumbling”, “incompetent”, “an idiot”, “a true embarrassment”, “totally nuts” and “truly an obnoxious adolescent”.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Robert F Kennedy’s Department of Health and Human Services has also provided a copy of Fauci’s phone to the Republican-led Senate panel. Kennedy had written a conspiratorial book attacking Fauci in 2021 that sold more than a million copies – thanks in part to blurbs from fellow non-scientists Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, Alan Dershowitz and Tony Robbins.
Scientists and Democrats have rallied behind Fauci, with a group of 155 scientists signing an open letter calling for the government to stop the “vilification and harassment of many American scientists”.
“This is only going to deter other scientific experts from public service,” Gary Peters, a Democratic senator of Michigan, said.
More to come.
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