Louisiana's attorney general announced a state investigation into Anthony Fauci days after he invoked the Fifth Amendment 111 times at a Senate hearing, and a growing coalition of Republican state officials says Joe Biden's preemptive pardon cannot shield him from state-level accountability.
Attorney General Liz Murrill made the announcement Saturday, declaring that Louisiana would join Florida and Alabama in examining whether Fauci committed offenses that could be prosecuted in state courts. The move came after Fauci's combative appearance before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on July 29, where the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases refused to answer a single substantive question from lawmakers of either party.
Murrill pointed to Louisiana's prior involvement in deposing Fauci in 2022, when then-Attorney General Jeff Landry, now the state's governor, questioned him under oath alongside Missouri officials. At the time, Fauci claimed he could not recall key details of his own actions during the pandemic. Murrill says the picture has changed since then.
The Washington Examiner reported that Murrill posted her announcement on X, writing:
"Fauci lied. Louisiana and Missouri deposed Dr. Fauci. At the time, he claimed to not recall many key details of his own actions and now we are discovering contemporaneous records he kept. Louisiana will join Alabama & Florida in investigating Fauci and whether he committed any other offenses that could be pursued in our State courts."
Governor Landry welcomed the announcement publicly. The governor's direct involvement in the 2022 deposition, and his apparent willingness to back a fresh investigation now that new records have surfaced, signals that Louisiana's probe carries institutional support at the highest level of state government.
The catalyst for the state-level investigations was Fauci's disastrous Senate appearance. Sen. Rand Paul, the Kentucky Republican who chairs the homeland security committee, had subpoenaed Fauci and released more than 1,000 pages of the former health official's personal pandemic-era diary ahead of the hearing. The diary's contents, National Review reported, revealed significant contradictions between what Fauci knew privately and what he told Congress and the American public.
Among the most striking discrepancies: Fauci's diary recorded that during a February 1, 2020, call with scientists, ten of twelve participants believed "deliberate insertion was possible", a reference to the theory that COVID-19 originated from a laboratory. Yet just eight days later, Fauci publicly dismissed the lab-leak theory as a conspiracy. The diary also showed Fauci privately believed COVID's mortality rate was 0.2 to 0.3 percent, while he testified before Congress that it was 1 to 3 percent, a figure he described as ten times more lethal than the flu.
Those contradictions are central to why state attorneys general believe they may have grounds for prosecution. If Fauci made false statements under oath during his 2022 deposition, when he claimed not to recall details that his own contemporaneous records appear to document, that could expose him to state-level charges that Biden's federal pardon does not cover.
Rather than address any of the discrepancies, Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment to every question. Not just the hard ones. Fox News reported that he declined to answer even trivial questions, including what day of the week it was. His attorney was ejected from the hearing room during the proceedings, adding to the confrontational atmosphere.
Fauci offered a prepared statement framing the hearing as a personal vendetta. He told the committee:
"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."
Paul responded directly, warning Fauci that his blanket refusal to testify would carry consequences. He told the former health official during the hearing that obstructing a congressional investigation is against the law and that the committee would consider appropriate action.
The legal question at the center of this fight is whether Biden's preemptive pardon, issued on his last day in office, provides Fauci any protection from state prosecution. The consensus among the Republican officials pursuing him is that it does not.
Sen. Tommy Tuberville, the Alabama Republican now running for governor, made that point explicitly. In remarks to Fox News, Tuberville said:
"Anthony Fauci is responsible for the deaths of millions of Americans and tens of thousands of Alabamians. The 'pardon' signed by Joe Biden's autopen doesn't apply to state-level crimes."
Tuberville added that if elected governor, he would look into ways Alabama could hold Fauci accountable. He faces Democrat Doug Jones, a former U.S. senator, in the November gubernatorial race. Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall has not commented publicly on Fauci since the hearing, though Marshall was among 17 state attorneys general who signed a letter last year to Republican congressional leaders demanding evidence to pursue state-level investigations.
Florida moved fastest. Attorney General James Uthmeier announced his state's investigation immediately after Fauci's Wednesday hearing, posting on X:
"Fauci's lack of candor to Congress is unbelievable. My office is launching an investigation into Dr. Fauci. It's past time we get the truth of what happened during COVID."
Paul said he would share evidence on Fauci directly with Uthmeier's office, a significant step that could give state prosecutors access to material gathered through congressional subpoena power.
The state investigations are only one front. On the federal side, Paul has scheduled a committee meeting for Wednesday to determine whether Fauci should be held in contempt of Congress for refusing to testify under subpoena. Paul hopes the contempt resolution can be referred directly to the Department of Justice for prosecution rather than going through a vote on the full Senate floor.
Republicans on the committee argue that Fauci's Fifth Amendment claim may not even be valid. Their reasoning draws on the 1896 Supreme Court case Brown v. Walker, which held that a witness who has been granted immunity from prosecution cannot invoke the Fifth Amendment because the threat of self-incrimination has been removed. Since Biden's pardon theoretically eliminates Fauci's federal criminal exposure, Republicans contend he had no legitimate basis to refuse testimony, and that his blanket refusal amounts to obstruction.
Criminal defense attorneys have noted that the strategy of refusing to answer every question, even innocuous ones, follows standard legal advice: once a witness begins testifying on a subject, they may waive their Fifth Amendment privilege on related topics. RealClearPolitics noted that this explains why Fauci declined to answer even mundane questions, though the tactic made his appearance far more damaging to his public credibility.
Sen. Roger Marshall pressed on the core issue during the hearing, asking plainly: "Why are there so many discrepancies in what was in his diary versus what he told us, what he told the public?" Fauci offered no answer.
Paul himself framed the stakes in blunt terms after the hearing, noting that Fauci could have simply told the truth without penalty, even if that meant admitting to destroying records.
"All he had to do today was tell the truth. If he testified and told the truth, even if he admitted to destroying thousands of records, which we think happened, there's no penalty attached. It would just be the truth."
The broader picture is one of accelerating legal pressure from multiple directions. Louisiana, Florida, and Alabama now have active or announced investigations. Seventeen state attorneys general have formally demanded evidence from Congress. Paul is pursuing contempt. And the diary that Fauci kept, the one he apparently forgot to mention during his 2022 deposition, has given prosecutors new material to work with.
The pardon Biden issued on his way out the door covers federal offenses only. It cannot reach into state courthouses in Baton Rouge, Tallahassee, or Montgomery. That was always the design flaw in a preemptive pardon issued before charges were even filed, it anticipated federal exposure but left the state-level flank wide open.
Efforts to hold Fauci accountable at the federal level have been complicated by the pardon's existence, which is precisely why state-level action has become the preferred path for Republican officials who believe Fauci misled the public and Congress about the origins, severity, and policy response to COVID-19.
Meanwhile, the broader push to declassify COVID-era records continues to produce new material that contradicts the official narrative Fauci maintained for years. Each new document release tightens the factual noose, not through political rhetoric, but through Fauci's own words measured against his own private records.
Biden's pardon was supposed to end this. Instead, it may have guaranteed that the real fight happens in state courts, where a presidential signature carries no weight and where the questions Fauci refused to answer will eventually have to be addressed, under oath, without the Fifth Amendment as a shield.
