1. United States
2. Ohio
3. Letter

As your constituent, I am writing to demand that Senate leadership intervene against the ongoing campaign targeting Dr. Anthony Fauci, an 85-year-old retired public servant, which has now escalated into a privacy violation against innocent third parties. Ahead of Fauci’s July 29 hearing, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, chaired by Senator Rand Paul, released more than 1,600 pages of Fauci’s personal diary entries, obtained from HHS, without redaction. In the course of building a case against Fauci, the committee exposed the names and medical histories of more than 20 private individuals he had contact with over his career, including people with cancer, HIV, Ebola, and even children—people with no connection to the investigation and no say in having their diagnoses made public. Pursuing one retired public servant does not justify violating the medical privacy of dozens of people who were never part of the story. At that hearing, Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination 111 times. Invoking a constitutional right is not evidence of wrongdoing, and it is not a crime. The committee nonetheless voted 8-5 along party lines to hold him in contempt of Congress. Rather than send that resolution to a full Senate floor vote, where it would need 60 votes and is not expected to pass, Chairman Paul announced he would bypass the floor entirely and deliver the referral directly to the Department of Justice. Legal experts say this shortcut has no legal force. A former senior counsel to the committee’s ranking member called Paul’s plan “silly theater” with “no legal effect,” noting that any procedural defect in a contempt resolution undermines the Justice Department’s ability to prosecute it at all. Another former DOJ adviser has noted that precedent requires the full Senate, not a single committee, to certify a contempt referral before it carries weight. Unable to get the votes for a real referral, and unable to point to actual evidence beyond an invoked constitutional right, the committee is now generating headlines through unredacted leaks instead. This is what a pursuit looks like when it runs out of evidence but not momentum: rules bent, then broken, to keep a years-long campaign alive. I urge you to: 1. Publicly state that committee referrals sent without full Senate approval carry no institutional authority. 2. Call on the Department of Justice to decline to act on this referral given its acknowledged procedural defects. 3. Refer Chairman Paul to the Select Committee on Ethics for the unredacted release of private medical information belonging to more than 20 individuals who were never part of this investigation. 4. Require the committee to formally notify and issue an apology to the individuals whose medical records were exposed, and to strike or seal the unredacted material from the public record. 5. Direct committee resources away from this lengthy, wasteful campaign chasing a referral they knew couldn’t survive a real vote, and back toward the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee’s actual legislative work. The Senate should protect its own institutional rules, the privacy of uninvolved third parties, and the integrity of its oversight process, regardless of who currently holds the gavel.