The United States Senate is set to vote on Thursday, August 6th, 2026, on whether to hold Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress. Fauci, who served as a key adviser to Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden during the Covid-19 pandemic, invoked the Fifth Amendment and refused to answer questions at a high-profile Senate committee hearing focused on the origins of Covid-19.

The hearing was called by Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, who has investigated Fauci for years. Fauci has accused Paul of having an “unhinged obsession” with him. Ahead of the hearing, Paul released what he described as Fauci’s “diary,” consisting of contemporaneous notes taken by Fauci during his public service. These notes include Fauci’s private descriptions of Trump as “rambling,” “crazy,” “desperate,” “bumbling,” “incompetent,” “an idiot,” “a true embarrassment,” “totally nuts,” and “truly an obnoxious adolescent.”

The Wall Street Journal reported that Robert F. Kennedy’s Department of Health and Human Services also provided a copy of Fauci’s phone to the Republican-led Senate panel. Kennedy authored a conspiratorial book attacking Fauci in 2021, which sold over a million copies, aided by endorsements from non-scientific figures such as Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, Alan Dershowitz, and Tony Robbins.

Senator Rand Paul, chairing the Republican-majority panel, hopes the resolution to hold Fauci in contempt will pass following the contentious hearing where Fauci repeatedly invoked the Fifth.

Gavin Yamey, director of the Center for Policy Impact in Global Health at Duke University, criticized the focus on Fauci, stating, “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. 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.”