Congressional investigators looking into Anthony Fauci’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic may have acquired something considerably more revealing than another round of testimony: a copy of the cellphone he used while running the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin announced Wednesday evening that the Senate Homeland Security Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations had obtained a copy of Fauci’s government-era phone from the Department of Health and Human Services.
“The Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations has obtained a copy of Dr. Fauci’s phone from HHS,” Johnson wrote on X. “Hopefully, this device will address many of the questions he refused to answer at last week’s hearing.”
The Wall Street Journal first reported the development. A spokeswoman for Johnson told the newspaper that Fauci used the device while serving as NIAID director.
That potentially gives investigators another source of contemporaneous records from one of the most consequential periods of Fauci’s government career.
Fauci led NIAID for 38 years before retiring from government at the end of 2022. During the pandemic, he became one of the country’s most recognizable public officials as the government confronted questions about lockdowns, vaccines, masks and the origins of SARS-CoV-2.
Now congressional investigators are digging back through those years.
The phone arrived in Senate investigators’ hands at an especially significant moment. Johnson announced its acquisition shortly before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee was scheduled to vote Thursday on whether to hold Fauci in contempt following his appearance the previous week.
During that hearing, Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment 111 times rather than answer numerous questions from senators.
Fauci made clear in his opening statement why he believed the constitutional protection was necessary.
“Given Senator [Rand] 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.
Paul sees things very differently.
“The committee will have to consider after this hearing what appropriate action should be taken against you for the failure to testify after being directed to do so,” the Kentucky Republican warned Fauci. “It’s against the law to obstruct an investigation of Congress.”
Republicans have also pointed to the sweeping federal pardon Fauci received from then-President Joe Biden shortly before Biden left office in January 2025. They argue that because the pardon substantially eliminated Fauci’s exposure to federal prosecution for conduct during the covered period, he lacked sufficient grounds to invoke the Fifth Amendment as broadly as he did.
Whether the pardon legally eliminated every reasonable basis for Fauci’s Fifth Amendment claims is a separate legal question. Receiving a pardon does not automatically allow congressional investigators to treat every invocation of the Fifth as unlawful.
Paul indicated that if the committee approved contempt, he intended to refer the matter to the Justice Department for potential prosecution.
But the newly obtained phone could ultimately prove more interesting than the procedural fight over Fauci’s testimony.
Investigators can now examine whatever government records were preserved from the device and compare them with other evidence already obtained by the committee. What the phone actually contains — and how complete the preserved data may be — remains to be seen.
The development follows Paul’s release of hundreds of pages from Fauci’s official diary ahead of his testimony.
Those records offered an unusually detailed look at Fauci’s activities during the pandemic, including his attention to interviews and media appearances as COVID spread around the world.
They also reignited arguments over what Fauci privately believed about the origins of the virus and what he subsequently told the public.
According to the material released by investigators, Fauci expressed early skepticism about the theory that the outbreak originated at a Wuhan wet market. Critics have contrasted those private discussions with later public comments in which Fauci discussed natural emergence scenarios.
The precise origins of SARS-CoV-2 have still not been conclusively established. U.S. intelligence agencies and scientific researchers have reached differing assessments about natural transmission and a possible laboratory-related incident, often with varying levels of confidence.
That uncertainty is one reason Fauci’s early communications remain of such interest to congressional investigators.
