Republican investigators are closing in on Anthony Fauci as unanswered questions from the COVID years continue piling up.

The newest discovery involves an eyebrow-raising detail buried inside the former federal health official’s government iPhone.

The Senate Homeland Security Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations recently obtained a copy of the phone used by Fauci during much of his tenure at the National Institutes of Health.

Investigators have downloaded its contents and begun examining years of communications.

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The development comes after Fauci refused to answer questions during a July congressional hearing.

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee voted Thursday to hold him in contempt of Congress, leaving the Justice Department to decide whether criminal charges are warranted.

That decision now rests with federal prosecutors, but Republicans are not waiting around for Washington bureaucrats to suddenly discover urgency.

They are pressing ahead with their own investigation into Fauci’s conduct, communications, and decision making during the pandemic.

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Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin chairs the investigative subcommittee handling the phone records.

He discussed the device Friday night on NewsNation during Katie Pavlich Tonight, where independent journalist Catherine Herridge was filling in as host.

Herridge attended Fauci’s congressional hearing and had signaled that Johnson would share significant information.

While the senator avoided revealing specific investigative findings, he confirmed that his staff has a staggering amount of material to review.

The phone reportedly contains more than 34,000 text messages and 533 voicemails.

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Investigators believe Fauci used the device from 2014 until just days before leaving the National Institutes of Health in December 2022.

That timeline covers years of government activity before COVID, throughout the pandemic, and during the political fallout that followed.

It could provide investigators with valuable insight into who Fauci contacted and what was discussed behind closed doors.

Johnson cautioned that the public should not expect every record to appear immediately.

Investigators must protect evidence, question additional witnesses, and avoid tipping off people whose accounts may need to be tested against the communications.

“This is not going to be a document dump,” he said. “I also need to preserve documents for our investigation.

We are interviewing other people that he may be texting. And if you’re going to get truthful answers out of people, you can’t necessarily show them all your investigatory material, as well."

That careful approach makes sense for a serious congressional investigation.

Dumping everything at once might generate headlines, but it could also allow witnesses to coordinate stories or tailor their answers after reviewing the committee’s evidence.

Johnson nevertheless promised that information important to the public would not remain buried forever.

He also expressed interest in coordinating future disclosures with Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, another persistent Fauci critic.

He continued, “So, again, I’m not going to hold this close to the vest when there are things that the public needs to see.

I’m hoping to work very closely with Senator Rand Paul and his staff and release these things jointly."

The most suspicious discovery so far concerns the phone’s contact list.

Despite apparently being used for roughly eight years by one of the most powerful figures in federal public health, the device contained only three saved contacts.

“I can’t and my staff can’t guarantee that everything was preserved. What is odd is most of those text messages are associated with a phone number.

He only had three contacts, which is pretty odd,” Johnson said.

Pretty odd is putting it mildly.

WATCH:

Fauci regularly communicated with federal officials, scientists, researchers, political figures, and media personalities, yet investigators supposedly found only three stored names on a phone containing tens of thousands of messages.

There could be an innocent technical explanation, but Republicans are right to treat the discovery as a glaring red flag.

It raises obvious questions about whether contact data was deleted, stored elsewhere, or deliberately never entered into the device.

The phone’s records may eventually clarify those questions, especially when investigators compare individual numbers with witnesses and other government documents.

For now, the strange contact list adds another layer of suspicion to a pandemic record already clouded by secrecy and evasive testimony.

Fauci spent years enjoying lavish praise from Democrats and much of the corporate press while Americans were told not to question the experts.

Congress is finally doing the questioning, and three lonely contacts on a heavily used government phone are not going to make those questions disappear.

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