Now we know why Fauci got a pardon

In January, in one of his final acts as president, Joe Biden issued a pardon to Dr. Anthony Fauci, the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. 

The reason for the preemptive pardon, we were told, was a rumored “enemies list” said to include those who had crossed President Donald Trump politically.

FAUCI ORDERED DELETION OF EMAILS RELEVANT TO COVID-19 ORIGINS, RAND PAUL ALLEGES

“The issuance of these pardons should not be mistaken as an acknowledgment that any individual engaged in any wrongdoing,” Biden said in a statement, “nor should acceptance be misconstrued as an admission of guilt for any offense.” (The Supreme Court and the Justice Department are less sure.)

Fauci said he welcomed the pardon but insisted he committed no crimes. 

Yet new congressional evidence suggests there was a very good reason Fauci received a preemptive pardon: He broke the law. 

Excerpts of emails released by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and shared on X by its chairman, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), reveal that Fauci instructed staff to destroy federal records on multiple occasions.

This is a no-no. The Federal Records Act requires federal employees to preserve records, including emails, that document official business. Deleting or instructing others to delete them is against the law.

Fauci almost certainly knew this, which is why he denied deleting any records — including emails — several times during a June 2024 hearing before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.

“Dr. Fauci, have you ever destroyed an official record?” Rep. James Comer (R-KY) bluntly asked.

“No,” Fauci responded. He offered similar responses — ”No.” and “No, I did not.” — when asked if he’d ever deleted emails or attempted to obstruct the release of public documents. 

This testimony, we now know, was false. 

“Please delete this email after you read it,” Fauci instructed then-NIH director Francis Collins in one correspondence dated Feb. 2, 2020.

The date is especially noteworthy. One day before, and a month before the government imposed sweeping pandemic lockdowns, Fauci and Collins were warned that COVID-19 might have leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. 

During what became known as the Proximal Origins call, officials agreed that “agencies should get ahead of the science and the narrative of this … so we are not reacting to reports that could be very damaging” (as Jeremy Farrar summarized in an email to Fauci and Collins).

We know what happened next. 

Work began on “the proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2” paper. When released as commentary (without data or peer review) in Nature Medicine, the paper denied that COVID-19 originated from a laboratory.  Behind closed doors, even the authors said the lab leak scenario was likely. But from the White House podium, Fauci claimed he had concrete scientific evidence that the virus had moved to humans from a “zoonotic origin” in bats.

It is indisputable that Fauci steered this “science” to avoid public scrutiny. Though his name was not on the proximal origin paper, Fauci received drafts, commented on them, and forwarded them to others.

Kristian Andersen, who had a multimillion-dollar grant pending at NIH when he wrote the paper, explained what the authors’ work entailed.  

“Our main work over the last couple of weeks has been focused on trying to disprove any type of lab theory,” Andersen said in one February email. 

Fauci later denied suppressing the lab leak theory, even though he referred to it as a “conspiracy theory” in his memoir. He’d claim it was laughable and “totally bizarre” to suggest, as Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) had, that Fauci supported one theory over the other. (This claim would have been more persuasive if not for the numerous media interviews Fauci gave in which he can be found saying he “strongly” favored the zoonotic origin theory.) 

The truth is, Fauci had good reason to suppress the lab leak theory.

Though Fauci denied for years in congressional hearings that NIH funded gain-of-function (virus-enhancing) research at Wuhan, he wasn’t telling the truth. Dr. Lawrence Tabak, principal deputy director at NIH, would testify in 2024 that United States taxpayers had indeed funded the controversial research.

In other words, NIH had abetted illegal research that likely led to the deaths of millions of people.

All of this explains why Fauci conspired with others to convince the world that COVID-19 had emerged naturally from a wet market in Wuhan, not the nearby facility that experimented on deadly viruses with U.S. taxpayer dollars. 

Yet in his attempt to deflect potential responsibility for the pandemic, Fauci appears to have violated not only scientific ethics but also federal statutes.

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Fauci may never be held accountable for his actions, thanks to his presidential pardon. But there’s still hope that Americans will receive truth, if not justice.

In light of these emails, Fauci is once again being summoned to testify before Congress. Expect his responses to be much more honest than those he offered during his last visit to the Hill.

Jon Miltimore is the senior editor at the American Institute for Economic Research. Follow him on Substack.