Fauci Took the Fifth. Now the Senate Has His Phone

I've been following the Fauci hearings in the Senate closely, and on August 10 the story took a turn. Senate Republicans released the first batch of text messages pulled off the government iPhone Dr. Anthony Fauci used through the pandemic, and Fox News put them on air. The network ran it as a news alert. That broadcast is what I'm reacting to here.

If you don't remember who Fauci is, he's the man who effectively put the world's economy on pause during Covid. President Biden gave him a retroactive pardon covering 2014 through 2025. He'd also worked with the lab in Wuhan for years, and that's where the virus is thought to have come from.

What the senators released

The two men behind this are Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, who chairs the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, and Rand Paul of Kentucky, who chairs the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Johnson asked for the phone, and HHS handed it over on August 5. It holds more than 34,000 text messages and 522 voicemails, and only three of its contacts are saved by name. Everything else is a bare phone number.

The first messages they put out are from January 2021, an exchange between Fauci, Dr. Rochelle Walensky and Dr. Vivek Murthy. Walensky had just taken over the CDC that month. Murthy had been Surgeon General under Obama, and Biden picked him to return to the job that March. The subject is vaccinating pregnant women. Fauci raises a concern about the second dose. Many people have significant cytokine storms and fever after the second dose, he writes, and this “theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the first trimester.” Walensky writes back that it's an important point, especially after the second dose.

Fox brought in Chad Pergram, its senior congressional correspondent, live from Capitol Hill. He read a message Murthy sent Fauci in late January 2021, asking whether there was any guidance for pregnant women weighing the shot, or any theoretical reason to vaccinate early in a pregnancy rather than late. A day later Murthy wrote again, this time about a statement the World Health Organization had just put out, advising against Moderna for pregnant women. He thought something that strong could shake pregnant women's confidence in public health officials.

The same release carries what Fauci wrote the next day, and Fox stopped before it. He wrote back to Walensky and Murthy: where the data on pregnant women is thin, you weigh the potential risks against the benefits, and Covid itself can hit hard in pregnancy. He added that more than 10,000 pregnant women had been vaccinated by that point with no issues arising. He raised the worry in private and answered it himself inside of a day, and both messages sit in the same batch.

That worry has been checked since. Researchers have found no link between Covid vaccination and miscarriage, and none between vaccination and complications in pregnancy. On the term itself: doctors describe a cytokine storm as a severe inflammatory response they don't see after vaccination, and say a shot lifts cytokine levels only briefly and nowhere near that far. Severe Covid can produce one. FactCheck.org and NBC News have both reported that the released texts are being used to revive a false claim about miscarriages.

The hearing, and the lawyer at the table

The hearing itself was July 29, before Paul's committee, and it ran hot. I like Rand Paul, and I agree with a lot of what he says. Fauci handled every question the same way. A senator would ask, and he'd read the same line back: the Fifth Amendment gave him the right not to answer. That was it, every time. The count was 111 — that is the figure Fox used on air, and the news reports since have carried the same number.

His lawyer sat right next to him and kept trying to break in. Paul eventually had security walk the man out of the room. The lawyer dug in and didn't want to go, and Paul came down hard on him: nobody had invited him, Paul said, and he had no right to be in that room. It took a while, but they got him out.

On August 6 the committee voted 8 to 5, along party lines, to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress. The referral went straight to the Justice Department rather than to the Senate floor, and when nothing came back, Paul asked a U.S. Attorney to investigate him.

Fauci's attorney, David Schertler, called the vote a crude political stunt meant to punish his client for using his constitutional rights, and said it was a continuation of Paul's personal vendetta. That is his answer to all of it, and it belongs here next to the rest.

Three names in a phone

The contact list is the detail I keep turning over. That phone holds more than 34,000 messages, and three people in it are saved by name. Pergram, who's covered Capitol Hill for years, called it strange and wouldn't guess at what it means — it may make it harder to figure out who Fauci was texting, or it may mean nothing more than that he never bothered saving names.

What I remember

I never took a booster, and I didn't want the first shot either. The problem was that you had to. If you wanted to go anywhere — even a restaurant — you had to show papers saying you'd been vaccinated, and without them you weren't getting through the door. That's where we ended up. And whether you had to take a shot depended on who you were.

The economy stopped, and you couldn't get into a restaurant without papers.

That's my complaint: the mandates, and shutting down the economy. I'm not going to tell anybody what the vaccine did or didn't do to them. The released texts show what the officials running the response were saying to each other in the first weeks of the rollout.

What I'm watching next

Fox had had the material for about twenty minutes when it went on air, and Pergram said flatly that 34,000 messages is more than anyone can process that fast. He thinks the documents go well beyond the vaccine. He also expects a long fight in court over whether Biden's pardon still covers Fauci if prosecutors move on him — and nothing like that gets settled fast.

Johnson and Paul have the whole phone. The rest of it comes out on their schedule.

I think a lot of you have your own Covid story — what happened to you, and what happened to the people around you. Put it in the comments.

Originally published as a video on my YouTube channel on 10 August 2026. Watch on YouTube