Fauci Will Testify Before the Senate, but the CIA Needs More Scrutiny Too

Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is in trouble.

Again.

This July, Fauci will be compelled to testify before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Recently, at the invitation of Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., Fauci had agreed to appear voluntarily, but last week he suddenly reneged. Paul thus issued a subpoena to force him to appear before the panel in a July public hearing.

Recall that on Jan. 19, 2025, then President Joe Biden—or perhaps the Autopen—gave Dr. Fauci a blanket pardon covering all his activities from 2014 to 2025, so he could avoid prosecution for any potential charge of perjury or any other offense. Obviously, Biden’s pardoning protection for any real or imagined past offenses is no longer applicable; Fauci would be criminally liable for any false statements before the Senate this July.

Recent events have made Fauci’s appearance necessary. David Morens, a senior advisor to Fauci at the National Institutes of Health, has already been indicted for concealing and falsifying federal records, including those related to the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Also, Tulsi Gabbard, outgoing director of the Office of National Intelligence, recently released reams of previously classified documents showing how senior CIA officials—“politicized career leadership”—collaborating with Fauci obstructed an honest assessment of the origins of the deadly COVID-19 pandemic.

Says Gabbard: “These documents expose Fauci’s direct role in influencing and manipulating IC [intelligence community] assessments on COVID-19, and how Fauci lied to Congress in 2024, when under oath he denied knowledge of or participation in discussions with intelligence officials about viral research.”

Gabbard’s charge that Fauci previously lied to Congress refers to his appearance before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic in June of 2024, during which he was asked about his interaction with intelligence officials. When asked whether he had briefed intelligence officials, Fauci replied that to the “best of his knowledge” he did not.

Gabbard’s newly released documents tell a very different story. For example, according to a March 5, 2026 (author redacted) email, “The IC took direction straight from NIH [National Institutes of Health] … the people that funded the Wuhan lab … A complex web of money and politics influencing analysis.”

Moreover, another communication in the document batch reads: “Dr. Fauci recommended that the IC reach out to the below individuals who were coauthors of the attached paper as part of the study.”

This is a reference to the controversial but influential “The Proximal Origin Of SARS-CoV-2,” a paper published in Nature Medicineby a select group of virologists (Kristian Andersen, Andrew Rambaut, W. Ian Lipkin, Edward C. Holmes, and Robert F. Garry) who determined that the novel coronavirus was not a “laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.”

Curiously, as revealed in a Jan. 31, 2020, email, the lead author Andersen, noting that Garry and Holmes agreed with him, found “the genome inconsistent with expectations of evolutionary theory.” In other words, the strange new coronavirus appeared to have been a genetically engineered laboratory product.

Congressional investigators last year concluded that Fauci “prompted” the paper, which had become the public health establishment’s baseline argument against the lab leak theory of the COVID-19 origin. Meanwhile, National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins famously dismissed the lab origin as a “conspiracy theory.”

Gabbard’s big document dump reinforces the blockbuster testimony of James Erdman, a 20-year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency. In his May 13, 2026 Senate testimony, Erdman contradicted Fauci’s account of his interactions with the intelligence community.

While Fauci told Congress he could not recollect his conversations with intelligence officials, Erdman is quite clear about the issue. Erdman recalled that Fauci injected himself into intelligence community deliberations at least twice: in February of 2020 and again in June of 2021.

According to an (author redacted) internal June 14, 2021, email, Fauci “expressed concern” over Chinese officials’ “quick and thorough cleaning” of the Wuhan market, which possibly erased “clues” of an animal source of the coronavirus, though he did not find it “alerting” that China had not yet found evidence of “a zoonotic transmission or intermediate animal host.” To this day, of course, proponents of a “natural origin” for COVID-19 have failed to identify any such animal host.

Concerning the June 2021 meeting with intelligence analysts, Erdman, the CIA whistleblower, told the senators: “Dr. Anthony Fauci influenced the IC’s analytic process and COVID origin’s findings by leveraging his position to ensure the IC consulted with a conflicted list of subject matter experts (SME), public health officials and scientists. This included the authors of the paper ‘The Proximal Origin of Sars-COV-2’ and other public health experts and scientists who have been in his orbit for 20+ years, many of whom have and did receive funding from NIAID, as well as scientists working under IC contract.” 

Sen. Paul and others have insisted that Fauci was not telling the truth, or at least the whole truth, in May and June 2021 Senate hearings concerning the American taxpayer funding of gain-of-function research at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology—experiments designed to increase the lethality and transmissibility of pathogens.

Curiously, among the documents Gabbard released to the public was a report of an unnamed “whistleblower” complaint against a federal official—almost certainly Fauci—alleging that his congressional testimony was “incorrect” based on “intelligence reporting.”

In an Aug. 16, 2021, email from Christopher C. Fonzone to Avril Haines, then director of the Office of National Intelligence, Fonzone drafted a set of “talking points” for Haines, one of which emphasized that, “The Acting IC IG could not conclude that the intelligence reporting cited by the complaint contradicted the relevant testimony, and my understanding, based on a conversation my team had with our expert on the topic, is that there is substantial disagreement within the scientific community as to what even constitutes ‘gain of function research.’”

The whistleblower complaint went nowhere.

What Fonzone missed, Erdman clarified in his recent Senate testimony: Fauci himself contributed to the confusion over what constitutes viral gain-of-function research. In 2025, House investigators concluded that Fauci had “played semantics” with the definition of gain-of-function research, and his testimony was, “at a minimum, misleading.”

Erdman reminded the senators that Fauci, working with other government scientists, helped “to rewrite definitions of GoF in 2015 to lift a funding pause on dangerous research.” The consequence of these bureaucratic machinations was a new and more expansive “operative definition” of such research eligible for federal funding.

Recall that in 2014, President Barack Obama had rightly imposed a pause on gain-of-function research, a policy broadly reaffirmed in 2025 by President Donald Trump. 

During the early phase of the pandemic, “mainstream” public health officials and their media allies were insisting that COVID-19 had a “natural origin” while dismissing a lab leak as a fringe obsession. Internal evidence and alternative explanations were either ignored or downplayed.

For example, embodied in Gabbard’s document cache is a May 27, 2020, report from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a top federal research institution. The Livermore scientists held a much more balanced view of the COVID-19 origin issue. Acknowledging the possibility of a natural origin for the novel coronavirus, they nonetheless stated: “We assess all of the necessary conditions for an accidental release of a laboratory-modified coronavirus- specifically a coronavirus adapted to recognize human cell receptors- were present at the Chinese Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in mid-to-late 2019.”

They noted, among other things, genetic similarities of certain “precursor” coronaviruses to COVID-19, the Wuhan lab’s demonstrated capacity for such genetic modifications, its research into adapting coronaviruses to human cells, and lax biosafety standards.

The high quality of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory report made little difference. CIA management embraced the then politically correct “natural origins” of the COVID-19 pandemic. As Erdman told the Senate, CIA officials even refused lawful requests for information from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and retaliated against analysts supporting the lab leak hypothesis.

Next month, when Senate investigators interrogate Fauci, they should also probe deeply into CIA management’s behavior during this entire sorry affair.

One thing is clear: The United States can no longer afford intelligence assessments—upon which the safety and security of the American people depend— to be compromised by partisan or politically correct assumptions. There must be a reckoning.