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President Trump said Wednesday he respects former President Biden’s pardon of Dr. Anthony Fauci, after the retired health official invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times during a Senate hearing on the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The most powerful thing a president has, they say, is the power of pardon,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “So he was pardoned by Biden, and I respect that. I know how powerful it is. … They say it’s literally the most powerful thing a president has.”
On his final day in office, Biden pardoned Fauci for potential federal offenses between Jan. 1, 2014, and Jan. 20, 2025.
That came roughly two years after Fauci, who served as a chief medical adviser to Biden and as a face of the first Trump administration’s COVID response, retired after a 38-year tenure in charge of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
The president added the “only thing you can think about” with respect to Biden’s pardon of Fauci is his predecessor’s use of the autopen in granting it. Trump and administration officials have argued that Biden using the autopen to sign orders and pardons renders them invalid — though other presidents have used an autopen in the past.
“He probably didn’t sign this one,” Trump said Wednesday, referring to Biden’s pardon of Fauci. “So, I can’t tell you what the law is. I’ve heard that you have to have a lot of proof, you need to have letters, you need to have all sorts of things.”
The president later added, “Maybe there’s something on the autopen. Other than that, the power of pardon is very powerful.”
During Wednesday’s three-hour Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing, Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment 111 times as Republican lawmakers lashed out at his role in the country’s pandemic response.
Ahead of the hearing, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), the panel’s chair, released thousands of pages of Fauci’s diary entries from 2019 through 2022, covering the duration of the pandemic. In his opening statement Wednesday, Fauci cited Paul’s “obvious obsession” with his prosecution in explaining his refusal to answer questions from lawmakers.
“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, ‘behind bars,’” Fauci remarked.
After the hearing, Paul said he will push for a vote in committee on holding Fauci in contempt of Congress next week.
Trump, meanwhile, said Fauci pleading the Fifth was “terrible.”
He continued, “I inherited Fauci. He was here from the 1980s, so I had him for a period of time. I disagreed with him on a lot. I would’ve had to close down the whole country if I listened to him.”
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