Anthony Fauci walked into a Senate hearing room Tuesday, invoked the Fifth Amendment over 100 times, and handed the Justice Department something it didn’t have before: the ideal test case to challenge every sweeping pardon Joe Biden issued in his final days — including the ones nobody was paying attention to.
Start with the autopen question, because it’s the one that could unravel everything. Biden’s handlers rushed through dozens of pardons in the final weeks of his presidency, many of them signed by machine rather than by a president who was, by every documented account, not fully cogent. The Fauci pardon — issued January 19, 2025, covering “any offenses” related to his NIH work going back to January 2014 — was almost certainly autopen-signed. Biden likely didn’t personally review it, let alone understand what he was signing.
Nobody has ever tested whether an autopen pardon is constitutionally valid. A presidential pardon is a personal act of executive clemency — a power vested in the president himself, not in a machine operated by his staff. If Biden didn’t personally authorize these pardons with full awareness of what he was signing, the constitutional argument that they’re invalid is not frivolous. It’s actually quite serious.
Fauci is the perfect vehicle to make that argument for several reasons. He is the most high-profile recipient of Biden’s blanket pardons. His public conduct during the pandemic — the lies about gain-of-function research, the manipulation of congressional testimony, the diary entries revealing a man more interested in his own celebrity than in public health, the federal records destruction allegations — gives prosecutors the most substantive underlying conduct to litigate. And his Fifth Amendment performance Tuesday, while constitutionally dubious given the pardon, creates the exact procedural posture needed to get the pardon’s validity before a federal court.
Here is how it works. Missouri GOP Sen. Josh Hawley is right that accepting a pardon forfeits Fifth Amendment protection — because the pardon removes criminal jeopardy and the Fifth only applies when your testimony might actually incriminate you. If Fauci has no criminal exposure because of the pardon, he has no Fifth Amendment right. If he still claims it, the committee can hold him in contempt. The DOJ can prosecute the contempt. Fauci’s lawyers will immediately file to dismiss based on the pardon. And that motion puts the pardon’s validity squarely before a federal judge.
Charge him with a crime, expect him to move for dismissal, and watch the autopen question get litigated in open court — with discovery, testimony, and evidence about exactly how Biden’s pardon operation actually functioned in those final chaotic days.
A criminal trial against Fauci isn’t just accountability for Fauci. It’s a public accounting of everything the Biden administration tried to bury on its way out the door. The pardons. The autopen. The decisions made by handlers who were running the executive branch while the president was running out of time.