Capitol Police don’t escort attorneys out of Senate hearing rooms every day. It happened this week, and the man being walked out has a New Jersey résumé most of the country watching didn’t know about.
Anthony Fauci sat before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Wednesday and invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination over and over, declining to answer question after question about his handling of the pandemic, the origins of COVID-19, and entries in a personal diary that Committee Chairman Rand Paul had released ahead of the hearing. That alone would have made for a tense three hour session. What actually dominated the headlines afterward was what happened to the man sitting beside him.
David Schertler, Fauci’s attorney, kept trying to speak on his client’s behalf without being formally recognized by the chair. Paul cut him off repeatedly, eventually telling him directly that he wasn’t there to testify and that the committee wouldn’t tolerate the interruptions, before ordering Capitol Police to physically remove him from the room. It’s the kind of moment that would dominate any hearing regardless of who was involved. It’s an even bigger story here, because New Jersey already knows exactly who David Schertler is.
He’s the same defense attorney who represented former New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez during his federal corruption and bribery trial, one of the most closely watched political prosecutions this state has seen in a generation. Schertler also represented Menendez’s wife, Nadine, earlier in that same sprawling case, before a conflict of interest tied to his own conversations with prosecutors led him to step aside ahead of her separate trial. Say what you want about how that case ultimately ended for both Menendezes. Schertler’s reputation as the lawyer politically connected clients call when things get genuinely serious has followed him from Trenton and Manhattan federal courtrooms straight into a Senate hearing room this week, and that continuity says something about the kind of legal firepower Fauci decided he needed at the table.
After being escorted into the hallway, Schertler didn’t back down from the moment. He told reporters he’d simply been trying to establish, on the record, that his client had a legitimate constitutional right to protect himself from further questioning. In a separate statement, he went considerably further, accusing Paul of pursuing what he called an outrageous, biased proceeding driven by years of personal fixation on Fauci. Paul, for his part, has been direct about his own reasoning. He’s argued that Fauci’s use of the Fifth Amendment doesn’t hold up given that former President Biden issued Fauci a preemptive pardon before leaving office, and he’s said plainly that the committee intends to vote next week on whether to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress over his refusal to answer.
Fauci’s own explanation for invoking the Fifth wasn’t subtle either. He told the committee that his decision came despite the respect he holds for the legislative branch and his long record of cooperating with Congress, framing the choice as a defensive one rather than an admission of anything. He’s characterized Paul’s pursuit of him as rooted in an “obsession” aimed at eventually seeing him jailed, language that’s been echoed almost verbatim across multiple outlets covering the hearing. Democrats on the committee pushed back hard on the proceeding’s framing too, with the panel’s ranking member arguing the entire exercise was designed to relitigate a conclusion Republicans had already reached years earlier rather than genuinely investigate anything new.
Here’s where I’ll offer an actual opinion rather than just laying out both sides and walking away. Watching a sitting committee chairman physically remove a defense attorney from a Senate hearing is a genuinely rare and significant escalation, regardless of which side of the underlying pandemic origins debate you land on. That’s not a small procedural footnote. It’s the kind of moment that tends to get remembered longer than the substance of whatever question prompted it. Whether Fauci’s Fifth Amendment invocation holds up as valid given his pardon, and whether Paul’s multi-year pursuit of Fauci reflects legitimate oversight or something more personal, are both genuinely contested questions that reasonable people are arguing furiously about right now, and neither one has a clean, settled answer yet.
What isn’t contested is the Jersey angle running quietly underneath all of it. A defense attorney seasoned by one of this state’s biggest corruption prosecutions just became the central character in a national Senate hearing meltdown, and the contempt vote scheduled for next week means this story isn’t finished unfolding. Whatever the committee decides, expect Schertler’s name, and his New Jersey history, to keep coming up as this plays out.
