“All he had to do was tell the truth.”

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U.S. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) said he was “really disappointed” that Dr. Anthony Fauci “chose not to testify” during a hearing of the Senate Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs Committee, considering that the former White House COVID czar could have “come clean” and “tell the truth,” without fear, since, under Joe Biden, he was given such an “extraordinarily sweeping” pardon.

The chairman of the Senate committee, Paul told Newsmax’s Rob Finnerty Wednesday evening that he was uncertain what to expect until he opened the hearing.

“I was disappointed,” said the senator, who is also a physician. “You know, I kind of hoped that he would try to come clean, that he would tell the truth. All he had to do was tell the truth.”

Paul explained Fauci could actually have simply admitted that he “destroyed records, that he previously lied to Congress” because he was “protected by pardon.”

“So, I was really disappointed that he hid behind the Fifth Amendment,” he continued. “It doesn’t seem to make sense because he was given complete immunity for a 10-year period for any possible crime. The only other person in the history of the United States that’s gotten this kind of pardon was Hunter Biden. So, it’s an extraordinary pardon. It’s extraordinarily sweeping and without limits, and yet he chose not to testify.”

Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment a total of 111 times during the heated hearing Wednesday while Republican senators confronted him with evidence of over one million Americans dead from COVID.

Many observed to him his arrogance and contempt for average Americans who, because of Fauci’s mandates, were forced to have themselves and their children take experimental mRNA COVID injections in order to keep their jobs, attend schools, and visit elderly loved ones in nursing homes.

During his interrogation, U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) responded to Fauci’s refusal to answer his questions by asserting he actually has no rights under the Fifth Amendment because he has been pardoned.

Citing the 1896 Supreme Court opinion in Brown v. Walker, Hawley quoted, “When he has been pardoned he may not stand upon his privilege.”

“This is about contempt, contempt for this body and contempt for the American people,” Hawley said.

Paul had previously released Fauci’s diary package – “meticulous notes” the COVID czar took about his “conversations, decisions, and his thoughts about actions taken by politicians and other officials,” Paul stated, noting the “almost-daily entries” comprise Fauci’s “own historical record.”

“Later in the pandemic, he gloried in the positive attention he was receiving from legacy media and demonized those who questioned his official narrative - like me,” the senator observed. “Many entries in Fauci’s daily historical account completely undermine the official narrative that Fauci and other public health officials espoused.”

On Monday – two days before the Senate hearing – Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. told Fox News’ The Ingraham Angle his department worked for eight months to retrieve Fauci’s notes from “11 separate servers, where they had been sequestered and secreted.”

Kennedy said he himself was “vilified” and de-platformed for asserting that COVID-19 “almost certainly came from the Wuhan lab.”

“[M]y Instagram was canceled with a million followers for misinformation,” he continued. “I never put any misinformation up. I put up all the things that we now know are true and it was called misinformation.”

“Because of Dr. Fauci’s leadership and other reasons, we had the highest mortality rate from COVID of any country in the world,” the secretary said. “We literally did worse than any nation in the world.”

On Tuesday, however, HHS announced the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has now permanently ended its funding of the dangerous gain-of-function research – which Fauci funded.

Throughout the pandemic and beyond, Paul, Kennedy, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin), and others have pointed to the experimental research as the spark for the spread of the COVID-19 virus.

“NIH has now issued a policy to make sure that these kind of experiments can never happen again,” Kennedy also told Fox News. “NIH will never again pay for a dangerous gain-of-function experiment.”

During his interview with Finnerty, Paul commented on where his Senate committee will go from here.

“I don’t think that you can really plead the Fifth Amendment when you’ve been given immunity,” he said. “This is a legal question, but I think we’ll present this to the Department of Justice with a legal brief arguing this, because, if he has immunity, what is he pleading that he can’t self-incriminate himself when he’s already been given immunity?”

Paul said the committee does consider Fauci’s refusal to answer questions during the hearing to be “contempt of Congress.”

“That is a crime. It’s a felony,” he emphasized. “We will refer him for it, but we’ll vote on it next week. And if we get it out of committee, we’ll send that referral directly to the Department of Justice.”

Meanwhile, other avenues of investigating Fauci and his colleagues are forming.

Johnson, who chairs the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, announced Wednesday he has sent letters to Fauci, former Food and Drug Administration (FDA) officials Dr. Peter Marks, Dr. Narayan Nair, Dr. Steven Anderson, and Dr. Manette Niu, requesting interviews about their roles in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, and regarding the safety and efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines.

“The American people deserve answers, and I will issue subpoenas if they do not appear voluntarily,” Johnson said.

Appearing on The Clay & Buck Show following the hearing, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) also explained that Fauci could be investigated for “violations of state law.”

“So, when he was testifying years ago – and a lot of us think he perjured himself in front of Congress – that wouldn’t implicate state law,” the governor said. “If there are things he was doing during COVID that would implicate state law, then you potentially could do it.”

“But then you would also have to have personal jurisdiction,” he added. “So there needs to be a nexus between him and a given state. Now, he did travel to Florida, I know … What was his conduct when he was here? I’m not sure.”

Nevertheless, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier announced that his office is moving to investigate Fauci following Wednesday’s explosive Senate committee hearing.

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