Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill announced her state will open an investigation into Anthony Fauci's conduct during the COVID-19 pandemic, making Louisiana the third state to pursue the former public health official at the state level.
Murrill's announcement came days after Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination more than 100 times during a Senate homeland security committee hearing chaired by Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky. Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier had already announced his own investigation the same day as the hearing. Alabama, whose attorney general signed a multi-state letter to Congress last year demanding evidence to pursue Fauci, rounds out the trio.
The former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases refused to answer lawmakers' questions about his handling of the pandemic, a performance that drew immediate consequences from Republican officials in statehouses and attorneys general offices across the South.
Murrill posted her announcement on X, tying the new investigation directly to what she described as dishonesty during a 2022 deposition that Louisiana and Missouri conducted when Jeff Landry, now the state's Republican governor, served as attorney general.
"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."
That claim, that Fauci told state officials under oath he could not remember key decisions, while privately maintaining records of those same decisions, is the sharpest allegation Murrill leveled. She did not specify what the records contain or how they were discovered.
Murrill added that Louisiana would investigate "whether he committed any other offenses that could be pursued in our State courts." Landry, who conducted the original deposition, welcomed the announcement.
The distinction between federal and state jurisdiction matters here. Former President Joe Biden issued a preemptive pardon for Fauci on his last day in office. A presidential pardon covers federal offenses. It does not shield a person from state-level criminal charges, a point Republicans have seized on as they press investigations forward.
Florida beat Louisiana to the punch. Uthmeier announced his investigation the same Wednesday that Fauci sat before Paul's committee and invoked the Fifth more than 100 times.
Uthmeier posted his rationale 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 with Uthmeier, a signal that the Senate investigation and the state-level probes may run on parallel tracks, feeding material to one another.
The Senate side of this fight is moving fast, too. Paul scheduled a committee meeting for Wednesday to vote on whether Fauci should be held in contempt for his refusal to answer questions at the hearing. Paul has said he hopes any contempt resolution would go directly to the Department of Justice for prosecution rather than to the full Senate floor, where Democratic opposition could slow the process.
Fauci's strategy at the hearing was blanket refusal. He did not selectively invoke the Fifth on a handful of sensitive questions. He did it more than 100 times, a wall of silence that left senators with no substantive answers about his pandemic-era decisions.
That approach may have limited Fauci's immediate legal exposure in the Senate chamber. But it also handed his critics a powerful political fact: the man who spent years as the public face of America's COVID response now refuses to discuss that response under oath.
The state-level pressure did not start this week. Last year, 17 state attorneys general, including Alabama's Steve Marshall, signed a letter to Republican leaders in Congress demanding evidence to pursue state-level investigations into Fauci. That letter laid the groundwork for the announcements now rolling in from Florida and Louisiana.
Marshall has not publicly commented on Fauci since the hearing, and it remains unclear whether Alabama has formally opened its own investigation beyond signing onto the multi-state letter. But Sen. Tommy Tuberville, the Alabama Republican who is running for governor, has made Fauci a centerpiece of his campaign.
Tuberville told Fox News that he views Fauci as bearing direct responsibility for pandemic deaths in his state:
"Anthony Fauci is responsible for the deaths of millions of Americans and tens of thousands of Alabamians."
That is an allegation, not an adjudicated finding. But Tuberville's framing reflects the depth of anger among Republican voters and officials who believe Fauci misled the public, suppressed debate over the origins of the virus, and evaded accountability at every turn.
Tuberville also pointed to the limits of Biden's pardon. "The 'pardon' signed by Joe Biden's autopen doesn't apply to state-level crimes," he said, adding: "When I'm governor of Alabama, I will look into ways we can hold Fauci accountable for all of the Alabamians who died under his watch." Tuberville faces Democrat Doug Jones in the November gubernatorial race.
The preemptive pardon Biden granted Fauci on his final day in office was designed to insulate the former NIAID director from federal prosecution. At the time, it looked like a firewall. But presidential pardons have always carried a basic limitation: they apply only to federal offenses. State crimes, perjury, fraud, obstruction, or any other charge a state attorney general might bring, fall outside a president's pardon power.
That gap is exactly where Murrill, Uthmeier, and potentially Marshall are now operating. The 2022 deposition that Louisiana and Missouri conducted gives state officials their own record of Fauci's sworn testimony, separate from anything he said or refused to say before Congress. If Fauci told state officials under oath that he could not recall key decisions, and contemporaneous records show he could, state prosecutors would have a factual basis to pursue charges without touching the federal pardon at all.
Congressional Republicans have also been building their own case. Calls for perjury investigations have intensified as declassified documents and new testimony have emerged.
Several major questions remain unanswered. What specific statutes are Louisiana, Florida, and Alabama considering? What do the "contemporaneous records" Murrill referenced actually contain? And what specific questions did Fauci refuse to answer at the Senate hearing? None of these details have been made public.
The broader pattern, though, is unmistakable. A man who once stood at podiums telling 330 million Americans how to live their lives now refuses to answer basic questions about the decisions he made from that position. Three states have opened investigations. A contempt vote is scheduled. And the pardon his allies arranged covers only half the legal landscape.
Accountability delayed is not accountability denied, and Fauci's wall of silence may have bought him time, but it also gave three attorneys general every reason to keep digging.
