We’re suing the Trump admin for illegally withholding billions for the Second Avenue Subway.

An Australian TMZ reporter confronted Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) outside a Senate hearing Thursday, challenging him to explain how punishing someone for using the Fifth Amendment could be constitutional.

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee had just voted 8-5 along party lines to hold former top federal health official Dr. Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress for invoking his Fifth Amendment right 111 times at a hearing last week. TMZ reporter Charlie Cotton caught Scott in the hallway immediately after.

"Now maybe I'm just, like, not in the know because I'm Australian," Cotton said to Scott, "but how can you hold someone in contempt and punish someone for using a constitutional right? Isn't it there to use as a right?"

Scott argued Fauci had no grounds to use it.

"He had a pardon, so he — he didn't have that right to do that once he had the pardon," the senator said.

"But didn't he have risk of prosecution because if he'd misspoke, or if he'd lied or something?" Cotton pressed.

"Yeah, if he lied," Scott admitted.

"So he was at risk?" Cotton pointed out.

"He didn't have the right," Scott insisted.

"But not from the hearing," Cotton said, "because the hearing — if he lied, you said that he could be held, you know, accountable for that."

"He could've just told the truth," Scott said. "That's all he had to do."

"Well, he felt like it was a witch hunt," Cotton pushed back, "and you guys would stop at nothing to catch him and send him to prison."

"That's not my intention," Scott said. "I just want to get information."

"It's Rand Paul's intention, though," Cotton pressed.

"No," Scott said. "It's for his actions."

As Cotton was asking his next question, the Republican senator quickly walked away.

"Yep. Okay then," the TMZ reporter said.

Former federal prosecutor Neama Rahmani told Newsweek that invoking the Fifth was "the right legal move" — the pardon covered past conduct, but pleading the Fifth protected Fauci from perjury charges based on anything he said at the hearing.

As CEO of Columbia/HCA, Scott himself invoked the Fifth Amendment 75 times in a 2000 civil deposition while the company faced a federal investigation that led to a $1.7 billion settlement — at the time the largest Medicare fraud case in American history, Florida Phoenix reported.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) planned to hand-deliver the contempt referral to the Justice Department Thursday, bypassing a full Senate floor vote, CBS News reported.

President Donald Trump left his cabinet secretaries and top advisers on a plane threatened by Iran while he moved to safety, The New York Times reported.

Air Force One was targeted by Iran as he left a NATO summit in Turkey, but reports are surfacing that Trump switched planes by hiding in a catering cart. However, the latest reporting by The Times reveals Trump also ditched Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and traveling press, who were "kept in the dark."

Two anonymous officials told Times reporter Maggie Haberman that Stephen Miller, Trump's top domestic policy adviser, and Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, were also left on the threatened decoy plane. Trump meanwhile left Ankara, Turkey, aboard a C-32A military jet.

According to Haberman's reporting, Rubio knew about the threat from Iran and that he was traveling on a plane that had been targeted for an attack. However, it's unclear if other top White House officials knew about the threat too.

The anonymous officials who spoke with Haberman said that at least some of the White House staff who also left on the endangered plane were unaware of the threat.

A White House spokesman didn't respond to a request from The Times for comment about the discussion to decide who would be left on the threatened plane and who would be whisked to safety with Trump.

The New York Times's reporting did, however, include a comment from Andrew Marlowe, the Hollywood screenwriter of the 1997 Harrison Ford thriller "Air Force One."

Marlowe told The Times that even though the Secret Service was trying to keep Trump safe, the optics of the reporting that has been coming out don't make him look good.

"Now real life isn't a movie, but given the circumstances, I'm not sure I could ever script a moment like that for a heroic main character," Marlowe said. "If the threat were that great, it's hard to imagine the audience rooting for any character who would trade his own safety by treating the remaining civilians onboard as potential sacrificial lambs, especially without their informed consent."