New documents released on Thursday by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) reveal that Dr. Anthony Fauci used deep connections to the intelligence community to influence key national security agencies in the debate over the origins of COVID-19.
Paul, chairman of the Senate homeland security committee, published nearly 90 pages of emails and other documents on Thursday detailing how Fauci steered the National Security Council and other bodies in the intelligence apparatus to downplay the theory that the virus came from a biomedical research lab incident in China.
The multi-decade document dump demonstrates the degree to which the national security community depended upon Fauci’s expertise as the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for 20 years prior to the pandemic.
More than 1 million Americans died during the pandemic following the spread of the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, from Wuhan, China, in late 2019, and Paul has increasingly used his committee chairmanship to investigate Fauci’s alleged role in obscuring the origins of the virus.
Fauci served as the director of NIAID, one of the most well-funded branches of the National Institutes of Health, from 1984 to his retirement in 2022.
During his tenure, Fauci acted as an adviser for the National Intelligence Council, the CIA, and other agencies on SARS viruses and other pathogens potentially being genetically manipulated to develop weapons of mass destruction.
The documents released by Paul corroborate allegations from whistleblower James Erdman, a career operations officer at the CIA who told the Senate committee on May 13 that Fauci was intimately involved in steering the intelligence community’s assessment of the origins of COVID in 2021.
During his testimony last month, Erdman said Fauci used his position to sway the intelligence community’s report on the virus’s origin to fit the narrative that it had a natural origin, rather than coming from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Emails reveal Fauci guided NIH-funded virologists and epidemiologists within his orbit to provide critical information to intelligence community officials during the development of the 90-day review of the origins of COVID commissioned by then-President Joe Biden from the intelligence community in May 2021.
The National Security Council on June 4, 2021, convened a classified briefing for Fauci, during which he advised intelligence personnel on experts to contact.
FIVE YEARS AGO: FAUCI DISMISSED LAB LEAK THEORY EVEN AS ADVISERS PRIVATELY DOUBTED
Among the experts recommended by Fauci was Kristian Andersen, lead author of the influential paper published in 2020 in The Lancet that downplayed the credibility of a lab leak in the early stages of the outbreak. Fauci and NIH Director Francis Collins aided in the drafting of the paper, documents now show.
Records show Fauci forwarded a copy of Andersen’s paper to National Security Council officials on July 8 after another classified reading-room session about the virus’s origins. Fauci called the group of authors “highly qualified virologists” and told the intelligence officials that their work “summarizes what I said yesterday” during the classified meeting the day prior.
Defense Department whistleblower report
Additional emails in the document dump reveal Fauci may have swayed national security officials to de-emphasize a whistleblower report about potential U.S. and NIH involvement in creating the COVID-19 virus.
Emails from the summer of 2021 show Fauci met with members of the National Security Council at the White House that August to review a Defense Department whistleblower report from a Marine Corps fellow with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA.
The Marine whistleblower said in his report, filed in August 2021, that the project, known as the DEFUSE project, was proposed for DARPA funding by EcoHealth Alliance, run by Fauci associate Peter Daszak. The goal of the project was to alter coronaviruses in an attempt to inoculate bats and prevent a SARS virus pandemic.
DARPA denied the proposal because it was deemed too high-risk and potentially in violation of the federal moratorium on gain-of-function research, a type of genetic engineering of pathogens that makes them more virulent or more easily infectious to humans.
But the whistleblower report says the project was funded by Fauci through NIAID to be conducted at the Wuhan lab in 2018 and was the likely source of the COVID pandemic.
“SARS-CoV-2 is an American-created recombinant bat vaccine, or its precursor virus,” the 2021 whistleblower report said. “It was created by an EcoHealth Alliance program at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), as suggested by the reporting surrounding the lab leak hypothesis. The details of this program have been concealed since the pandemic began.”
The documents released by Paul on Thursday do not outline what happened following Fauci’s review of the DARPA whistleblower report in 2021.
The DEFUSE project subsequently became the centerpiece of the House Oversight Committee’s investigation into the origins of the pandemic, which eventually led to EcoHealth Alliance being prohibited from all federal funding for future research projects in 2024.
Alleged partisanship in the investigation
Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI), the leading Democrat on the homeland security committee, has accused Paul of conducting the investigation into Fauci in a partisan manner.
Fauci is slated to testify before the homeland security committee in a closed-door session later this month, but Peters says the meeting is scheduled to only be with Republican members and staff, excluding Democrats.
Peters wrote to Paul on Tuesday, before the document dump, to express concern that the move to have a GOP-only transcribed interview with Fauci “is completely unprecedented.” He said conducting the inquiry in a partisan manner “undermines the legitimacy of current and future Committee investigations.”
Peters also criticized Paul’s handling of Erdman’s whistleblower deposition and public testimony, saying Democrats were effectively blocked from attending both events.
“Rather than attempting to work together to pursue areas of shared concern, you have directed your investigative efforts at Dr. Fauci in a manner that appears to be pursuing an outcome you have prejudged,” Peters wrote to Paul.