August 7, 2026 - WASHINGTON, D.C. – On Thursday, Senator Ron Johnson released the following:

Today, U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, voted to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress during a business meeting of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. The vote follows Dr. Fauci’s refusal to comply with the committee’s investigation in his role during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as his silence in last Wednesday’s hearing.

Sen: “If these investigations are one-sided, it’s because one side simply doesn’t want to look at the truth.”

Sen. Johnson’s remarks:

“Thank you, Mr. Chairman. First of all, I want to associate myself with and second your opening comments. And I also want to strongly rebut the comments from our Democratic colleagues here, you know, particularly when Ranking Member Peters says this has been ‘one-sided’ and ‘rushed,’ rushed?

“When I was chairman of this committee back in 2020, I started conducting oversight. I held hearings. There was no cooperation in those hearings. As a matter of fact, I remember one when we held a hearing with Dr. Pierre Kory, when he came in with all kinds of evidence on the effectiveness of ivermectin. The ranking member then denigrated him. Back then, Dr. Kory was a Democrat. He was shocked at the treatment he was given by the ranking member.

“How many people died because they lacked early treatment with safe, effective generic drugs? Well, that hearing laid out the truth that this could be something that could help people, and we had a ranking member that did everything that he could to denigrate that truth.

“My current experience is as the chairman of PSI; we’ve been holding hearing after hearing. My ranking member, [Senator] Blumenthal, in those hearings, we had one called ‘Voices of the Vaccine Injured.’ We had parents come in and tell their heart-wrenching stories. We had parents coming in, telling the truth. And the ranking member, a few hours before that hearing, held a press conference and said, ‘hope the press doesn’t cover it, because there’s nothing credible about this hearing.’

“If these investigations are one-sided, it’s because one side simply doesn’t want to look at the truth. They want to bury the truth. They want to memory-hole it. They don’t want to look at the Fauci diaries and take a look at how contradictory what he wrote to himself –how contradictory it was to what he actually told the public.

“I think one of the revelations of those diaries, I think probably the most significant one that’s being overlooked, was early on in the pandemic, he wrote in his diaries he thought COVID would be maybe twice a bad flu season. Now, I’m not downplaying a bad flu season. We have them oftentimes. They overwhelm hospitals, something to take seriously. But a pandemic that’s going to be twice that – is that really worth destroying people’s lives, shutting down businesses, destroying an economy? I argued back then that it wouldn’t be.

“It’s been six years since the pandemic began. We have not had a reckoning of what happened. Last Wednesday’s hearing was an excellent hearing from the standpoint of legitimate questions being raised, legitimate questions the American people want answers to, legitimate questions that some of them, only Anthony Fauci, ‘Saint Fauci,’ ‘Mr. Science’ could answer.

“And even though we have quotes of him saying, ‘I’m not afraid of any oversight committee, I’m happy to talk to any oversight committee, I have nothing to hide.’ That’s not the position he took last Wednesday. What he displayed last Wednesday was contempt for Congress, contempt for this committee, contempt for our investigation, the same contempt that … our ranking members have shown for the diligent oversight and the exposing of the truth that I’ve been undertaking for six years.

“There’s nothing rushed. It’s been one-sided, but not because we haven’t reached out, not because we haven’t involved the other side. The other side, like way too many Americans, have just closed their eyes, covered up their ears, and refused – refused to look at the truth.

“I am definitely going to vote yes on contempt of Congress, and my investigation has just begun.

“We’ve invited Dr. Fauci for a transcribed interview. Okay, he doesn’t want to do it in front of the American public? Come in front of our committee. We’ll go through detail [by] detail. You say you have nothing to hide. Good. We’ll do it behind closed doors. We’ll transcribe it. That’s only one of the interviews we will be conducting … Last week’s hearing just began the accountability. There’s a lot more accountability that’s required.

“Thank you, Mr. Chairman.”

Watch the full remarks here. 

Source: Senator Ron Johnson