Dr. Anthony Fauci on Wednesday repeatedly invoked the Fifth Amendment and declined to answer dozens of questions from senators at a Republican-led committee hearing on his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.

For now, the decision shielded Fauci from questions that could have exposed him to accusations of lying under oath. Although former Democratic President Joe Biden pardoned Fauci in early 2025, some Republicans who have pursued a yearslong effort to see him arrested have argued he could still face charges for perjury committed during Wednesday’s hearing.

Fauci, who helped lead the nation’s COVID-19 response, had been subpoenaed to testify under oath by Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, who has long had a hostile relationship with him.

In response to angry and at times mocking questions from Republican senators, Fauci declined to answer more than 100 times, adding new tension to partisan disputes that have simmered for years over the origins of the pandemic and the government’s response. Fauci has become a deeply polarizing figure and has received death threats that led him to seek security.

In his opening statement, Fauci said Paul had an “obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution.”

“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, quote, behind bars, unquote,” Fauci said, adding that although it pained him to do so, he was following his attorney’s advice by taking the Fifth.

Paul, who has long argued that Fauci should be criminally investigated because he believes the scientist gave dishonest testimony to Congress, said the committee will vote next week on whether to hold Fauci in contempt for refusing to answer questions.

He did not say whether he would seek a criminal contempt referral to federal prosecutors or pursue another charge. He also questioned whether Fauci’s pardon affects his ability to claim Fifth Amendment protection.

During the combative hearing, Paul and other Republicans accused Fauci of lying in earlier testimony about the coronavirus’s origins, an allegation the longtime National Institutes of Health scientist has forcefully denied. Democrats described the hearing as a politically motivated effort to trap Fauci and praised his work during the pandemic.

With Fauci refusing to answer questions throughout, Paul dominated the roughly three-hour hearing, reading a long list of accusations and detailed questions.

“Today will be the capstone to Anthony Fauci’s 40 years of abuse of power at NIH,” Paul said. “History will judge, but the facts as we now know them paint a sordid tale of dishonesty, misjudgment and ultimately the hubris, the likes of which the world has never seen.”

At one heated moment, Paul ejected Fauci’s attorney, David Schertler, from the room after he attempted to speak without being recognized. In a statement, Schertler called the removal “outrageous and demonstrates the completely biased and baseless nature of this proceeding.” In another statement, he described Paul’s accusations against Fauci as “false and disgraceful.”

Democratic senators defended Fauci and said he did not deserve the treatment he was receiving.

“This hearing is designed to entrap you,” said Sen. Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire.

Ahead of the hearing, Paul released more than 1,000 pages of Fauci’s personal diary from the pandemic years. Pointing to notes about early attempts to understand how the virus emerged, Paul said on social media that what Fauci “wrote privately and what he told the country are two different stories.”

Some of the diary entries — including Fauci’s uncertainty in the earliest days of the pandemic, when scientists around the world were racing to understand the new virus and how best to stop it before vaccines could be developed — had already been reflected in a 2024 memoir and in interviews from that period.

Still, the diary has drawn fresh attention from people who blame Fauci for mask mandates, school closures and other policies they say infringed on their rights while hundreds of thousands of people were dying.

President Donald Trump wrote on social media Wednesday that he stopped relying on Fauci during the pandemic because he believed the scientist made poor decisions on masks, shutdowns and other issues. He later told reporters he watched the entire hearing.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime anti-vaccine activist before entering public office, said on social media that his department found the diary entries on government property and provided them to the committee.

Scientists also rallied to Fauci’s defense before the unusual hearing — his second appearance before Congress to discuss pandemic origins since leaving government in 2022. Although the COVID-19 pandemic introduced him to millions of Americans, Fauci had spent decades guiding the nation through outbreaks including HIV, Ebola and the 2001 anthrax attacks, while advising seven presidents.

In a public letter, more than 150 infectious-disease experts and other scientists wrote that “no credible evidence has been produced to support these absurd charges” and urged elected officials to “stop these witch-hunts.”

Among the subjects discussed on Wednesday was whether NIH-funded research in China may have played a role in the start of the pandemic. The dispute remains central to the political fight because the answer helps shape how lawmakers and the public assess U.S. oversight of overseas research, but the hearing did not produce new scientific evidence.

Many scientists believe the virus most likely emerged in nature and spread from animals to people, first becoming widely known when it circulated through a wildlife market in Wuhan, China. There is no new scientific evidence supporting the theory that the virus instead leaked from a laboratory, a theory Paul supports. A GOP-led subcommittee that studied the issue in 2024 found no evidence linking Fauci to wrongdoing.

Fauci has long said publicly that he was open to both theories, but that the evidence points more strongly to COVID-19’s natural origins.

Republicans have also accused Fauci of lying about whether his agency funded what is known as gain-of-function research — the practice of enhancing a virus in a lab to study its possible real-world effects — at a lab in Wuhan. That issue has continued to drive scrutiny of how federal grants were reviewed and described during the pandemic response.

For years, the NIH awarded grants to a New York nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance, which used some of the money to work with a Chinese lab studying coronaviruses commonly carried by bats. But the term gain-of-function covers both general research and especially risky experiments that increase the ability of potential pandemic viruses to spread or cause severe disease in humans. Fauci has previously said he was referring to the risky-experiment definition and that “it would be molecularly impossible” for those bat virus experiments to have produced the pandemic virus.

Trump, a Republican, paused some federally funded gain-of-function research last year, and on Tuesday his administration announced new rules to tighten oversight.

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Swenson reported from New York.

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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com