Dr. Anthony Fauci, who helped lead the national response to the Covid-19 pandemic as the country’s longtime chief infectious disease expert, invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination at least 90 times Wednesday in a contentious hearing focused on the origins of the virus in China. Fauci was clear about his reason for pleading the 5th: He believes the hearing was a set-up for a perjury investigation by the Justice Department—a realistic assessment of how the Trump administration is wielding its prosecutorial powers to go after people the president doesn’t like.

The hearing was chaired by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), a harsh Fauci critic. “Given Senator Paul’s obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution, his repeated slanderous comments about me, and recently his publicly releasing my unredacted personal diary aimed at embarrassing and intimidating me,” the NIH veteran said in his opening statement, “the only conclusion I can reach is that the sole reason he is calling me before this committee is to get me to say something that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, ‘behind bars.’”

This isn’t a hypothetical concern, and it’s not simply animated by Paul’s animosity toward Fauci. Congressional Republicans and the Justice Department, now under the control of former Trump lawyer Todd Blanche, have repeatedly used testimony to gin up perjury investigations and charges against people the president doesn’t like. That’s turned testimony before Congress—which should be a public service sharing information to inform our laws—into the first step toward a criminal investigation.

Pleading the Fifth is not a clean solution.

Just a week ago, House Judiciary Committee chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) sent the DOJ a criminal referral accusing former special counsel Jack Smith of lying to Congress in testimony last December. During his confirmation hearing,........

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