Hawley to Fauci: ‘You Got Rich, Didn’t You … While People Were Dying?’

As the main character in the film Thank You For Smoking quips about his Senate testimony: “Never let it be said that the public beating has gone out of style.”

As I wrote this morning, Anthony Fauci made the predictable and dangerous decision to refuse to answer questions under subpoena today in a Senate hearing. That creates two big risks for Fauci, both of which Josh Hawley demonstrated in his attempts to get Fauci to answer questions. The first, I pointed out earlier, is that Fauci’s pardon does not allow him to use the Fifth Amendment to refuse to answer questions. Hawley prepared for this with the Supreme Court precedent that will undergird a Senate contempt charge:

HOLY SHIT!! 🔥🔥

Josh Hawley just trolled the living hell out of Fauci and then absolutely DESTROYED and EXPOSED him in front of the entire country. pic.twitter.com/eSTdkdBiHt

— Gain of Fauci (@DschlopesIsBack) July 29, 2026

HAWLEY: Let’s get one thing straight. You don’t have any rights under the Fifth Amendment, because you’ve been pardoned, as you very well know. As the Supreme Court has been clear for a century or more, Brown v Walker, 1896: ‘When he has been pardoned, he may not stand upon his privilege.’ You know that, your lawyers sitting behind you shifting nervously in their chairs, they know it. This isn’t about the Constitution, this isn’t about the law. This is about contempt – contempt for this body and contempt for the American people.

We’ll get to the rest of Hawley’s quote in a moment, but let’s take a look at the case Hawley cites. In Brown v Walker, the court reached back to English common law as well as other precedential decisions to reach the same conclusion. When a pardon or amnesty has removed the risk of prosecution for past actions, witnesses must testify and cannot resort to the Fifth Amendment. That’s true even if truthful testimony could “disgrace” the witness:

If the answer of the witness may have a tendency to disgrace him or bring him into disrepute, and the proposed evidence be material to the issue on trial, the great weight of authority is that he may be compelled to answer, although, if the answer can have no effect upon the case, except so far as to impair the credibility of the witness, he may fall back upon his privilege. 1 Greenl. Ev. §§ 454, 455; People v. Mather, 4 Wend. 229; Lohman v. People, 1 N. Y. 379; Com. v. Reberts, Brightly N. P. 109; Weldon v. Burch, 12 Ill. 374; Cundell v. Pratt, 1 Moody & M. 108; Ex parte Rowe, 7 Cal. 184. But, even in the latter case, if the answer of the witness will not directly show his infamy, but only tend to disgrace him, he is bound to answer. …

It is almost a necessary corollary of the above propositions that, if the witness has already received a pardon, he cannot longer set up his privilege, since he stands, with respect to such offense, as if it had never been committed. 

This has been bedrock immunity law for well over a century. Prosecutors and Congress rely on it to force testimony through the use of immunity deals as well as executive-branch pardons. The only legal liabilities that result from subpoenas regarding already-immunized testimony are perjury and contempt for refusing to testify honestly. Brown v Walker makes it clear that the Fifth Amendment ‘privilege’ only extends to criminal liabilities, not personal embarrassment.

That brings us to the second risk Fauci runs: the unanswered public beating. In the film Thank You For Smoking, Nick Naylor uses the hearing to flip attacks back onto his senatorial nemesis, Ortolan Finistirre. That strategy was only possible because Naylor chose not to take the Fifth. In real life, Fauci’s contemptuous and improper use of the Fifth Amendment allowed Hawley and other Republicans to deliver the public beating that Naylor laments. Back to Hawley:

HAWLEY: … But I think I know why you’re doing it. It’s because you don’t want to answer questions. It’s because you did all kinds of terrible things. It’s because in the pandemic, you got rich, didn’t you? You got rich while people were dying, hundreds of thousands of Americans, over a million in the end, and you were getting rich. And not only were you doing that, you were using federal employees with taxpayer money to apply for and solicit cash prizes – for you, personally. Cash prizes totalling over a million dollars. You did all of that during the pandemic, didn’t you?

That’s a question.

Fauci sputtered out his Fifth Amendment script in response. However, Hawley did more than ask a question. He set up the necessity of the contempt citation that the committee will almost certainly send to the Senate as a whole. For a contempt charge to stick, the refusal to testify usually has to relate to a significant legislative purpose. Oversight can be strong enough, but Hawley is alleging that Fauci misused federal resources for personal gain. The pardon covers Fauci’s criminal liability for such alleged actions, but that doesn’t mean that Congress can’t act to strengthen rules and regulations to prevent such actions in the future. Hawley just established a very substantive foundation for pursuing a contempt citation that can be referred to the Department of Justice for prosecution. 

Worth noting on that point, too: Votes on contempt citations are not subject to filibusters, as they are actions by the body rather than legislation. That doesn’t mean Democrats won’t use other means to slow down a citation, but they can’t stop it as long as Republicans have a majority in favor of it. 

Finally, Hawley completed his public beating by making Fauci sit through this. Enjoy it for now; come back for Fauci’s Steve Bannon sentence in the near future. 

Sen. Josh Hawley to Dr. Anthony Fauci during Senate hearing:
“Somewhere along the line, it became all about you. You became a narcissist and a megalomaniac and a liar. And you’ve lied to the American people, and you’ve lied to this body!”pic.twitter.com/evnMinTUWp

— Salem News Channel (@WatchSalemNews) July 29, 2026