Australia’s Largest Christian News Site

Gabbard released 1,600 pages of declassified documents on her final day in office revealing how the intelligence community built a protective structure around Fauci and defended it in the name of national security.

Outgoing US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released never-before-seen intelligence documents last Thursday revealing that Dr Anthony Fauci funded dangerous gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, manipulated intelligence community assessments on COVID-19’s origins, and lied to Congress under oath in 2024.

Gabbard, who is departing her role to support her husband through cancer, used her final day in office to release 67 declassified documents and emails through the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

“The COVID-19 pandemic caused tremendous hardship and pain for millions of our fellow Americans and for countless people around the world,” she said in a press release. “After years of lies, censorship, and cover-ups, the American people deserve transparency, truth, and accountability.”

The 1,600-page release follows a yearlong declassification review conducted under President Donald Trump’s maximum transparency mandate.

As head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Fauci channelled millions in US taxpayer dollars to fund bat coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology — work assessed by multiple US agencies, including the FBI and the Department of Energy, as the source of the unintentional lab leak that sparked the pandemic.

Senator Rand Paul, who has referred Fauci to the Department of Justice multiple times for criminal prosecution, welcomed the release. “This release includes additional documents revealing the truth about the lab-leak origins and Fauci’s lies to Congress under oath,” Paul said. “Thank you, Director Gabbard.”

Former President Joe Biden issued Fauci a sweeping preemptive pardon covering actions from January 2014 through January 2025 as one of his final acts in office, though President Trump has contested the validity of that pardon, citing Biden’s cognitive decline and congressional findings that the pardon batch was signed by autopen rather than Biden directly.

Three Roles, One Cover-Up

Gabbard’s video statement, released alongside the documents, laid out the case against Fauci in three parts.

First, Fauci funded risky gain-of-function coronavirus research “linked to big pharma and their pursuit of universal vaccines worth trillions of dollars,” she said.

Second, he 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” — funded, she said, using taxpayer dollars “in a deliberate attempt to cover up the truth”.

Third, he became “the nation’s pandemic pundit” who “publicly pushed lies, disinformation, and censorship using every platform available”.

“Dr Fauci’s close relationships with the intelligence community enabled him to assume three key roles that shielded him from scrutiny,” Gabbard summarised.

“The tactics that were used to hide the truth are straight from the deep state playbook. Politicised, self-serving leaders like Dr Fauci covered up their own wrongdoing and abuses of power, manipulated intelligence, lied to Congress, and undermined a duly elected president by restricting his access to the vital facts he needed to keep the country safe.”

The Cover-Up Mechanism

The documents expose what the ODNI described as a “self-serving circular reporting loop”. Fauci provided hand-picked NIAID-funded scientists to advise intelligence community analysts. That input shaped official intelligence assessments, which were then publicly cited as scientific consensus to refute the lab-leak theory. According to hundreds of reviewed emails, intelligence officials almost always incorporated Fauci’s recommendations.

One July 2021 email shows an intelligence official describing Fauci not as a policymaker but “a subject matter expert with a wealth of knowledge” who “probably knows better than most who the real coronavirus experts are”. Those recommended experts supported a natural-origin conclusion. Dissenters, according to the ODNI, were ignored.

Fauci also promoted ‘The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2’ — a scientific paper whose publication he secretly commissioned — submitting it to intelligence officials as legitimate scientific guidance without disclosing his role in commissioning it.

A May 27, 2020, assessment from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Z Program — included in the release — concluded that all necessary conditions for an accidental release of a laboratory-modified coronavirus were present at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in mid-to-late 2019. It assigned equal weight to a laboratory origin and a natural-origin scenario. That assessment existed while prominent scientific publications, including the February 2020 Lancet letter and the ‘Proximal Origin’ paper were publicly characterising the lab-leak hypothesis as a conspiracy theory.

The files also include the Year 5 progress report for EcoHealth Alliance’s NIH grant. Under Specific Aim 3, the project outlined plans to sequence spike genes from bat coronaviruses, create receptor mutants to assess how much further evolution would be needed for efficient use of human ACE2, conduct pseudovirus binding assays, and perform infection experiments in cell lines and humanised mice.

That research track overlaps with the 2018 DEFUSE proposal, involving EcoHealth Alliance, Peter Daszak, Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina, and Shi Zhengli’s team at Wuhan — a proposal that sought to create chimeric bat coronaviruses with enhanced human infectivity and that considered the use of a furin cleavage site insertion to improve lung-cell entry.

A June 8, 2021, internal email in the release references a 2016 New York Academy of Medicine meeting at which Daszak reportedly discussed colleagues in China “manipulating the spike protein on coronavirus to make them more virulent”. Other emails from 2020 and 2021 show officials debating a DOD report on a “suspicious added furin-site”.

Fauci’s Testimony Contradicted

The documents directly contradict Fauci’s sworn testimony before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic in 2024. Asked whether he had spoken to “the FBI, CIA, DIA, or any US intelligence agency concerning viral research” before, during, or after the pandemic, Fauci said “not to my knowledge about COVID”.

The newly released files show he met with CIA Weapons and Counterproliferation Mission Center personnel on June 4, 2021 — weeks after denying to the Senate that NIH had funded gain-of-function research at Wuhan.

During that briefing, Fauci discussed pangolin experiments at the Wuhan lab, expressed particular interest in WIV work on pangolin samples from late 2019, and urged intelligence officials to connect with scientists more aligned with a natural-origin conclusion.

A CIA email confirms that the same 40-minute secure video teleconference involved CIA personnel, and that Fauci offered views on single-lineage versus multi-lineage evidence and recommended US scientists for the IC to consult.

Fauci is not described as raising any alarms about the research that his own agency had funded.

In a separate January 2024 transcribed interview, Fauci acknowledged being briefed “once or twice” by intelligence agencies in a secure NIH facility and recalled a further briefing in a White House Situation Room. Those admissions, Gabbard said, “directly contradicts his sworn testimony”.

As The Daily Declaration reported in May, a decorated CIA senior operations officer had already testified under oath before the US Senate that intelligence officials buried and rewrote evidence pointing to a Wuhan laboratory origin — and that Fauci steered the process using hand-picked, conflicted scientists. The same whistleblower said that six of seven technical experts involved in the CIA’s internal review had backed the lab-leak theory before a late-night edit reversed the conclusion.

Whistleblower Retaliation

Multiple intelligence community whistleblowers provided testimony to ODNI describing systematic retaliation against analysts who challenged the natural-origin conclusion. Gabbard said their accounts reveal “a clear pattern of suppressing dissent, silencing critics, and burying the truth”.

One contractor was terminated within days of coming forward to ODNI. Managers reminded analysts who advocated for the lab-leak hypothesis that leadership was in control of decisions about promotion. “The message was clear,” Gabbard said. “Go along or be punished.”

Senior officials allegedly removed anonymity protections from the whistleblower complaint process and required managers or attorneys to be present at ODNI meetings where analysts sought to give testimony.

The newly released files also show that a 2021 whistleblower complaint — alleging Fauci provided false testimony to Congress about gain-of-function research — was redirected by then-DNI Avril Haines away from the impartial HHS Inspector General and toward Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, a fellow Biden political appointee.

Gabbard has referred all whistleblower accounts to the Intelligence Community’s Inspector General.

Fauci’s former senior adviser David Morens was charged in May for conspiring to suppress evidence that COVID-19 leaked from a Chinese laboratory, including deleting records and obstructing transparency laws.

The five-year statute of limitations for criminal perjury charges against Fauci himself expired last month.

“Politicised, self-serving leaders like Dr Fauci covered up their own wrongdoing and abuses of power, manipulated intelligence, lied to Congress, and undermined a duly elected president by restricting his access to vital facts he needed to keep the country safe,” Gabbard concluded. “It’s time you know the truth.”