Dr. Anthony Fauci’s lawyer was ordered removed from a heated Senate hearing after he tried to speak in defense of the infectious disease expert, who is refusing to answer questions about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic as part of what he described as a years-long partisan crusade intended to smear him.

Fauci’s lawyer, David Schertler, was escorted from the room after the Senate Homeland Security Committee’s Republican chair Rand Paul warned of “consequences” and “repercussions” for Fauci’s refusal to testify on Wednesday.

“Another word and you’re gone!” Paul shouted to Schertler as he tried to speak after Fauci’s opening statement.

After his brief opening remarks, the 85-year-old former National Institutes of Health official invoked the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution and declined to answer the committee’s questions.

“Given Senator Paul’s obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution, his repeated slanderous comments about me, and recently, his publicly releasing my personal diary aimed at embarrassing and intimidating me, is that the sole reason he is calling me before this committee is to get me to say something, anything, that can vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up in his words quote, ‘behind bars,’ end quote,” Fauci said.

“Any person who has followed his unhinged obsession with me would come to the same conclusion” to avoid answering his questions, he continued.

“Although it pains me to say so, and because of the respect I have for the legislative branch of the federal government … under the advice of my attorneys, I will invoke my right to the Fifth Amendment to refrain from answering your questions,” Fauci said.

Democratic members of the panel have stated that the Republican senator is wrongly seeking to trap him in a potential misstep that could lead to perjury charges.

In a statement to NBC News after leaving the hearing, Schertler said Fauci has a “valid Fifth Amendment privilege and he has the right to assert it. That’s what I was trying to tell the committee and that’s all I was trying to tell the committee.”

During a round of probing questions from Paul, Fauci repeatedly answered: “On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution.”

Fauci, who steered the nation’s initial response to the COVID-19 pandemic, has previously testified to Congress under oath about the pandemic’s origins, including questions from Paul and Senate Republicans who have sought to publicly grill Fauci on whether the outbreak began with a lab leak in Wuhan, China.

This week, in his latest escalation of a yearslong feud, Paul released more than 1,000 pages of Fauci’s personal records, including his notes during Donald Trump’s response to the pandemic and entries detailing his efforts to counter the president’s false statements. Trump’s Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr said he shared the documents with Republican members of the Senate panel.

Under the first Trump administration, Fauci contradicted the president and officials over mitigation efforts and unproven treatments and a refusal among Republicans to address the seriousness of the public health threat, which killed more than 1 million people in the U.S.

Despite the speed and efficacy of the Trump administration’s vaccine development, Fauci has attributed the difficulty of a comprehensive response to the rapid mutation and contagion of the disease against a backdrop of patchwork public health infrastructure, conflicting guidance and the politically volatile, anti-science and partisan response.

In April 2021, Fauci wrote that members of the “radical right wing” like Paul were trying to “connect me with the virus from WUHAN.”

“They are saying that I deliberately worked with the Chinese together with [zoologist] Peter Daszak to create a virus that would be released to the world,” he wrote at the time. “This sounds very much like a way-out conspiracy theory, which it is. However, there are enough crazy people around to make this a problem.”

The following month, he wrote that the conspiracy theory was evolving again thanks to “the usual cast of characters.”

Fauci, who was preemptively pardoned by Joe Biden, has repeatedly denied allegations of a cover-up. Critics have accused Paul and his allies of abandoning oversight responsibilities during the Trump administration to pursue an ideological crusade despite outbreaks of cyclospora and measles across the U.S. and a lethal Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

“No credible evidence has been produced to support these absurd charges,” a group of more than 150 scientists and physicians wrote in an open letter in defense of Fauci on Tuesday. “These conspiracy theories have led to a five-year period of harassment and threats of violence directed at Dr. Fauci and his family.”

Infectious-disease experts have also insisted to Paul and other Republicans that while the National Institutes of Health funded virus research in Wuhan, that work could not have sparked an outbreak.

Trump and his allies, however, have embraced the narrative. The Trump administration created a website that claims the “true” origin of the pandemic was the result of a lab leak without sharing any definitive evidence.

Paul, who has spent years using his position on the panel to investigate Fauci and the origins of the pandemic, said in his opening statement that Fauci should “come clean” and “ask for forgiveness” to ensure “a man-made epidemic never happens again.”

Fauci, according to Paul, has spent years “avoiding responsibility.”

“There will be another pandemic. There will be another crisis,” he said. “They will invoke science as if it’s a commandment.”

As public support for the nation’s institutions declines under a health agency that elevates conspiracy theories, public health officials “have it backwards,” according to Paul.

It is “secrecy,” “arrogance,” “censorship” and a “refusal to admit error” that destroys public trust, Paul said.

Fauci had previously denied that the National Institutes of Health directly funded gain-of-function research — in which a studied pathogen is altered to make it more transmissible in an effort to better predict emerging diseases and combat them with vaccines — at a Wuhan lab that has been scrutinized as a possible source of the disease.

In 2022, the GOP senator suggested Fauci, who was serving at the time as the chief White House medical adviser and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, had lied to Congress over whether the agency supported such research.

“Senator Paul, you do not know what you’re talking about, quite frankly, and I want to say that officially,” Fauci said at the time. “You do not know what you’re talking about.”

Sen. Gary Peters, the top Democrat on the panel, slammed Paul for leading a hearing that “looks backwards.”

“We are instead litigating the past,” he said Wednesday.

While “COVID-19 exposed serious deficiencies in our nation’s public health infrastructure,” the committee is avoiding asking “forward-looking, life-saving questions” to “better prepare Americans when the next emergency occurs.”

This is a developing story