As she left office last week, Donald Trump’s former director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, dropped what she apparently considered to be a major bombshell: 333 pages of previously classified documents, all of them concerning interactions between America’s former Covid czar, Anthony Fauci, and the US intelligence agencies, dating all the way back to 2019.
Naturally, the mainstream media has almost entirely ignored what she released – Fauci’s image among mainstream journalists as a messiah-type figure who guided humanity from the outer darkness into the light of lockdowns and vaccine mandates is so deeply baked in, and hostility to the Trump administration so reflexive, that it will take much more than simple documentary revelations or facts ever to shake it.
Yet in Gabbard’s interpretation, the documents she released prove beyond reasonable doubt that Fauci – who received a full pardon from President Joe Biden for any crimes he may or may not have committed in office – is guilty of two things: directing US taxpayer dollars to the research that inadvertently brought about the Covid pandemic and lying about it under oath.
So, are those claims supported by the released documents?
Fauci’s Funding of Wuhan
It is abundantly clear both from the newly released documents and from previous releases that US taxpayer cash funded “bat coronavirus research” at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, albeit not directly. The mechanism was indirect: the US government’s National Institutes of Health – under Fauci’s control – awarded cash to a group called the EcoHealth Alliance in the amount of $8m. Around $600,000 of this was then forwarded to Wuhan for the specific purpose of researching bat coronaviruses, from 2014 to 2019.
So, far from being the man to end the pandemic, there is strong evidence that Fauci's leadership was critical in bringing it about. This may be an inconvenient truth, but a truth it remains.
Misdirecting the Public
As in all scandals, the bigger issue may well be not “what happened?” but “who knew, and when?”
The single most explosive claim made by Gabbard is not that Fauci was involved in the funding of coronavirus research at Wuhan, but rather that he used his considerable influence to misdirect the public, and US intelligence agencies, away from looking at the lab-leak hypothesis entirely, in order to cover up his own role in bringing the pandemic about.
For example: the documents show Fauci acted as an informal scientific adviser to US intelligence officials, recommended specific experts and steered attention toward evidence he considered supportive of the idea that the virus had naturally passed from animal to human. Given that he had direct knowledge of what was happening at Wuhan, this surely casts grave doubts on his credibility. Why would he play down the possibility of a lab leak, given that he knew directly that Wuhan was researching the very family of viruses that had emerged as the cause of the pandemic? That question is hard to answer while maintaining one’s view of Fauci as an honest broker.
Misleading Congress?
Then there is the issue of whether Fauci lied to Congress. “Lying” is a hard charge to prove, but the documents certainly do cast doubt on Fauci’s 2024 testimony, in which the doctor appeared entirely unwilling to discuss his contact with intelligence officials. At one point, he told Congress that he simply could not remember discussing the issue with intelligence officials directly. Yet it happened so often – on dozens of occasions – that believing this is now quite difficult.
Does that prove perjury? No – but it should make most rational people raise an eyebrow.
The records show Fauci briefing intelligence officials, recommending outside experts for consultation and providing assessments of the available evidence. That is a long way from the image of a scientist standing entirely apart from the political and intelligence machinery of Washington.
Serious Questions of Propriety
The issue here is relatively simple, taken in the round: what the documents show is that Dr Anthony Fauci was critical not only to the Covid pandemic beginning, but to vast swathes of misinformation about that pandemic being fed to the public at the time.
He funded the research. He knew that it concerned bat coronaviruses. He knew that it had a gain-of-function element. He must have known – barring complete incompetence – that there was a strong possibility that the pandemic had leaked from the very facility his agency funded.
And yet? He consistently pushed US intelligence agencies, tasked with advising policymakers, toward an alternative and much less plausible theory involving somebody in Wuhan perhaps eating a pangolin. He advanced this theory in private and in public, while serving as his nation’s chief medical advisor.
This is entirely separate from the treatments and lockdowns that he supported. It shows a man who must have known that his own actions had at least a mild causative effect in bringing the pandemic about and yet worked hard to cast blame elsewhere.
Among many in the media, Fauci’s reputation is unassailable. It was formed in the contrast between him and his then boss, Donald Trump, with Fauci portrayed as the aloof and science-led figure making objective and wise choices, while Trump acted nakedly in his own self-interest. That story, clearly, was a myth.
There is a reason, after all, why Joe Biden decided to give Fauci a pardon. And it was not because Donald Trump is a monster – it is, one might suspect, because Biden’s officials were aware of what was in the documents that have just been released.