Sen. Ron Johnson says career bureaucrats inside the Department of Health and Human Services are actively undermining efforts by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to bring transparency to the agency's pandemic-era conduct, including records from Dr. Anthony Fauci's government iPhone.
Johnson, the Wisconsin Republican who chairs the Senate Homeland Security Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, told Fox News Digital that long-serving HHS employees who participated in what he called a "cover-up" during the COVID-19 pandemic are now working to keep that information buried. His subcommittee recently released the first batch of private messages recovered from Fauci's government-issued iPhone, more than 34,000 text messages and 522 voicemails, and Johnson made clear he believes the full picture is still being hidden.
Among the texts already made public: a message Fauci sent to former CDC Director Rochelle Walensky and former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy raising a specific safety concern about the second dose of mRNA vaccines and pregnant women in their first trimester. Johnson called that revelation the "tip of the iceberg."
The text message from Fauci, recovered from his government phone, reads in full:
"I asked around a bit more and another issue came up that you need to be aware of. Since many people have significant cytokines storm and fever after the 2nd dose, this theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester."
Johnson argued the message carries direct consequences for public trust. Fauci's concern about a link between the second mRNA dose and first-trimester miscarriage, Johnson said, "immediately impacts public safety, immediately impacts informed consent." The question it raises is straightforward: if the nation's top infectious disease official privately flagged a potential risk to pregnant women, why wasn't that concern reflected in the public guidance those same officials were issuing?
The texts in the first tranche were exchanged between Fauci and two of the most senior public health officials in the Biden administration, Walensky at the CDC and Murthy as surgeon general. No dates for the messages have been disclosed publicly. The exact context and full scope of the remaining 34,000-plus texts and 522 voicemails have not yet been released.
Johnson's sharpest charge was not about what the texts contain but about what is still being withheld, and by whom. He described a situation in which Kennedy, despite being the Senate-confirmed head of HHS, cannot fully access or control the flow of information from within his own department.
"Again, we don't know what we don't know. We don't know what HHS has. Bobby Kennedy doesn't know what HHS has."
Johnson pointed to the entrenched nature of the problem. The career employees obstructing transparency, he said, are the same people who should have been monitoring vaccine safety all along.
"Most of the people serving in these agencies have been there a long time, and they were involved in the cover-up. They were supposed to be surveilling for vaccine injuries and they weren't."
He went further, describing Kennedy's internal battle in blunt terms:
"Bobby Kennedy has people in those agencies sabotaging his efforts at radical transparency. So this is like pulling teeth. So, I mean, I did not know they had government-issued phones. They've been sitting there, locked away somewhere."
That last detail, that Johnson himself did not know government-issued phones existed and had been sitting in storage, underscores how much pandemic-era documentation may still be unaccounted for. HHS did not respond to Fox News Digital's request for comment.
The phone records are one piece of a broader congressional investigation that has escalated sharply in recent months. Just The News reported that Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination 111 times during testimony before the Senate Homeland Security Committee. Senators Johnson and Paul also have millions of pages of additional material from government servers that have yet to be released publicly.
Fauci's refusal to answer questions led directly to a formal consequence. The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, chaired by Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, voted 8-5 to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress, as the Washington Examiner reported. Paul has said he plans to refer the contempt charge directly to the Department of Justice, bypassing a full Senate vote.
Paul's argument rests on a specific legal point: Fauci accepted a preemptive pardon from President Biden before leaving office, and Paul contends that pardon eliminates Fauci's grounds for invoking the Fifth on federal matters. Democrats on the committee disagreed. Sen. Maggie Hassan argued the real goal was to bait Fauci into a misstatement that could lead to new criminal charges outside the pardon's scope.
"We are voting on whether a witness who has received the benefit of a sweeping federal pardon can be ordered by this committee to answer questions and then defy that order without consequence."
That was Paul, framing the vote. Biden's pardon covers only federal prosecution. Three states, Louisiana, Alabama, and Florida, are separately investigating Fauci for potential criminal charges, which means state-level legal exposure remains regardless of the pardon.
Kennedy himself has weighed in on the broader credibility crisis. He said Fauci bears responsibility for Americans' lack of trust in public health institutions and added that "they shouldn't" trust those institutions because they were "lied to." Kennedy's remarks, as reported by Fox News Digital, were not presented as a full verbatim statement, but the fragments are pointed enough: the sitting HHS secretary is saying the public was deliberately misled by the man who ran the nation's infectious disease response.
Johnson framed Kennedy as someone still fighting for control of his own agency. He described Kennedy as "gaining a little bit more control" over HHS, a characterization that, if accurate, means the nation's health secretary is months into the job and still does not have full command of the bureaucracy he leads. For an agency that spent the pandemic years telling the public to trust the science, the resistance to basic transparency from within is difficult to square.
The volume of material on Fauci's government iPhone alone is staggering. Over 34,000 text messages. Five hundred and twenty-two voicemails. And that is just one phone from one official. Johnson and Paul have signaled that millions of additional pages from government servers remain in the pipeline. The first tranche was released by Johnson's subcommittee, and it immediately surfaced the Fauci text about miscarriage risk, a private concern from the government's most prominent pandemic advisor that never became part of the public conversation about vaccine safety for pregnant women.
Johnson has framed his investigation around public health and safety, not politics. But the pattern he describes, career employees sitting on records, a cabinet secretary unable to access his own agency's files, a former official invoking the Fifth over a hundred times, points to an institutional resistance that goes well beyond one man's text messages. The question is whether the system that failed to share critical safety information during the pandemic is now actively preventing accountability after it.
When the people who were supposed to protect the public start protecting themselves instead, the public has every right to ask what else is locked away on those phones.
