On her final day as Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard dropped nearly 500 pages of declassified documents that paint a damning picture: Dr. Anthony Fauci funneled millions in taxpayer dollars to fund gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, then worked hand-in-glove with elements of the intelligence community to bury the truth about what he had done.
The documents, released Friday along with never-before-seen communications, allege that Fauci lied to Congress under oath in 2024 and that politicized intelligence officials helped suppress the lab-leak origin of COVID-19 to shield him from accountability.
This is no longer a fringe theory. It is a documented trail of funding, meetings, and contradictions, and the question now is whether anyone in Washington has the will to follow it to its end.
Gabbard framed the release in stark terms. "After years of lies, censorship, and cover-ups, the American people deserve transparency, truth, and accountability," she said. She described the tactics used to conceal the truth as "straight from the deep state playbook: politicized self-serving leaders like Dr. Fauci covered up their own wrongdoing and abuses of power, manipulated intelligence, lied to Congress."
The documents reportedly reveal that Fauci's "close relationships" with intelligence officials "shielded him from scrutiny as he wielded outsized influence." Gabbard stated that Fauci was "the behind-the-scenes advisor who, alongside his hand-picked so-called experts, pushed the intelligence community to endorse a natural, animal origin to hide his dangerous gain-of-function research that he funded using taxpayer dollars."
One of the most striking details, as Newsmax reported, involves a June 4, 2021 meeting between Fauci and CIA personnel, nearly a month after Fauci denied in a Senate hearing that he had funded gain-of-function coronavirus research. At that meeting, Fauci was described as "particularly interested" in the Wuhan lab's work on pangolin samples and asked for specifics, contradicting the impression he gave Congress that he was "presumably not tracking" such research.
That gap between Fauci's sworn testimony and his documented conduct is precisely the kind of discrepancy that criminal investigators exist to examine.
The Washington Examiner laid out a detailed timeline showing how Fauci helped shape the very intelligence assessments that were supposed to be independent. On February 1, 2020, Fauci participated in a Zoom call that preceded the influential scientific paper "The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2," which promoted a natural-origin explanation for the virus. NIH Director Francis Collins reportedly instructed that neither he nor Fauci be explicitly credited in the paper.
Then came the kicker: Fauci later recommended the very authors of that paper as subject-matter experts for the intelligence community's own origins report. He seeded the conclusion, then pointed investigators toward the people who had already reached it. That is not science. That is narrative management.
As we have previously reported, CIA whistleblower testimony has alleged that Fauci deliberately steered intelligence agencies away from the lab-leak conclusion, a pattern the newly declassified documents now corroborate with documentary evidence.
Fauci himself has flatly denied wrongdoing. "I have not lied before Congress. I have never lied. Certainly not before Congress. Case closed," he told the Senate in July 2021. The declassified record suggests the case is anything but closed.
The funding pipeline ran through EcoHealth Alliance, the now-defunct New York-based nonprofit founded by Peter Daszak. EcoHealth received millions in grants from Fauci's organization at NIH/NIAID, which it then routed to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. But EcoHealth's entanglements went further than NIH. The Department of Defense was described as Daszak's biggest donor, providing more than $40 million for work characterized as "combating weapons of mass destruction."
Daszak told House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer that he had been contacted by the CIA and other intelligence agencies, though he did not specify when. A former EcoHealth employee, speaking anonymously in August 2021, alleged that Daszak was approached by the CIA in late 2015 to help access the Wuhan lab.
That CIA connection matters. If intelligence agencies were already working with the intermediary that channeled Fauci's research dollars to Wuhan, the cover-up wasn't an afterthought. It was baked into the architecture.
Fox News confirmed that Gabbard declassified hundreds of documents and that the release prompted tangible federal action, including the suspension of EcoHealth Alliance funding. A former EcoHealth leader dismissed the revelations as a "nothing burger", a characterization that grows harder to maintain with each new page of declassified material.
Long before Gabbard's document release, evidence pointed to a much earlier outbreak than China acknowledged. A Harvard Medical School study published in June 2020 used aerial satellite images of five Wuhan hospitals and found "a steep increase in volume starting in August 2019," culminating in a peak in December 2019, the month of the first confirmed COVID-19 case.
Between September and October 2019, five of the six hospitals showed their highest traffic levels, "coinciding with elevated levels of Baidu search queries for the terms 'diarrhea' and 'cough.'" The virus was circulating months before Beijing admitted anything. And during the fall and winter of 2019, the White House was consumed by impeachment proceedings, triggered by a complaint lodged in August 2019 by CIA analyst Eric Ciaramella.
The timing is worth sitting with. While Washington tore itself apart over a phone call, a pandemic was building in Wuhan, funded in part by American tax dollars funneled through a nonprofit operating out of a nondescript Manhattan office building.
Sen. Rand Paul has sent criminal referrals to the Department of Justice against Fauci for alleged perjury in his 2024 congressional testimony. Paul also insists that Biden's blanket pardon for Fauci should be challenged in court, arguing that it was signed with an autopen, a claim that, if proven, could raise questions about the pardon's legal validity.
That pardon, issued in Biden's final minutes in office, stretches back to January 1, 2014, an 11-year blanket of protection that encompasses Fauci's oversight of NIH/NIAID funding of gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab via EcoHealth Alliance. The start date matches that of Biden's pardon for his son Hunter, a coincidence the record leaves unexplained.
Rep. Darrell Issa has added his voice to the push. Issa called for an official investigation on two counts: perjury before Congress and cover-up. "It appears as though he willfully impeded Congress and everyone else in getting to the truth, which probably cost even more lives," Issa said.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. went further, describing the events as "among the most consequential crimes in human history."
Whether the DOJ acts on Paul's referrals remains an open question. As of now, no court challenge to the Biden pardon has been filed, and the Justice Department has not publicly responded.
Two days after Gabbard released the declassified documents, the Washington Post published a 9,000-word article, not about Fauci, not about gain-of-function research, not about the intelligence community's role in suppressing the lab-leak theory. The Post devoted those 9,000 words to Gabbard's alleged ties to a Hindu "guru."
The Post had not, as of the article's publication, run a word about Gabbard's Fauci revelations. On the liberal social media platform Bluesky, users were still discussing wet markets and pangolins as if the last five years of evidence had never happened.
That pattern, the refusal to engage with documented evidence when it threatens preferred narratives, is itself part of the cover-up. Not in the conspiratorial sense, but in the practical one. When major outlets decline to cover the most significant intelligence declassification in years, they make a choice about what their readers are allowed to know.
Gabbard left her post due to her husband's illness. President Trump installed Bill Pulte as interim DNI successor, and former SEC chairman Jay Clayton has been named as the next permanent director, though Trump intervened to slow his Senate confirmation. Gabbard used her final hours to ensure the documents reached the public before she walked out the door.
Meanwhile, Fauci, now 85 years old, holds the title of "distinguished university professor" at Georgetown University and collects a government pension. He faces criminal referrals but enjoys the protection of an 11-year blanket pardon. No charges have been filed. No trial is scheduled.
Just The News reported that a whistleblower has requested an investigation into whether Fauci lied to Congress about funding gain-of-function research, adding yet another voice to the growing chorus demanding answers from an 85-year-old man who insists he has nothing to answer for.
The declassified record now runs to hundreds of pages. It documents funding, meetings, contradictions between sworn testimony and private conduct, and a pattern of intelligence manipulation that served one man's reputation at the expense of a nation's right to know how a pandemic began.
A cover-up this deep doesn't survive on one man's lies. It survives because the institutions that should expose it, the intelligence agencies, the press, the Justice Department, decide that protecting their own is more important than protecting the public. That calculation is exactly what these documents lay bare.
