Newly declassified documents show Anthony Fauci had deep, sustained ties to U.S. intelligence agencies dating to 2003, and a CIA whistleblower says those ties shaped how the government handled the lab-leak debate during COVID-19.
Sen. Rand Paul, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, released a detailed timeline on Thursday revealing the former NIAID director's relationship with the intelligence community ran far deeper and longer than previously known. The documents, drawn from Senate committee records and declassified intelligence files, trace Fauci's involvement with national security officials back nearly 20 years before the pandemic began.
The earliest entry is August 2003. That month, Fauci formally reviewed and provided feedback on a National Intelligence Council paper examining SARS implications for the United States. The NIC incorporated his input and thanked him by name in the published version, according to the documents Paul released. It was the beginning of a relationship between the country's top infectious disease official and the U.S. spy apparatus that would prove consequential two decades later.
During the Biden administration's 90-day COVID-origins intelligence review in June 2021, that relationship moved to a different level. According to the HSGAC documents, Fauci repeatedly received highly classified briefings from top intelligence officials during the review, sitting in on assessments so sensitive they could not leave the White House complex. Paul's timeline describes Fauci as having been inserted into the process at two critical junctures: first in February 2020 as the pandemic was erupting, then again when the intelligence community launched its formal origins assessment.
The documents land alongside testimony from a CIA officer who told the committee, under oath, that Fauci's influence had a direct effect on the conclusions that reached the public. James Erdman III, a senior CIA operations officer who led the agency's Director's Initiatives Group investigation into COVID-19 origins, testified on May 13 that the cover-up was intentional. "Dr. Fauci's role in the cover-up was intentional," Erdman said, according to his HSGAC testimony.
Erdman told the committee that CIA scientific analysts concluded multiple times between 2021 and 2023 that a laboratory leak was the most likely origin of the pandemic. Those findings, he said, never shaped the official narrative and were never disclosed to Congress. Instead, the Biden administration "decided to write a different paper," producing five pages of heavily redacted material from what Erdman described as thousands of pages of underlying intelligence. Fauci has not publicly responded to Erdman's specific allegations.
The question Paul's documents put most directly is whether Fauci's classified access to intelligence shaped his public messaging. Throughout 2020 and 2021, Fauci repeatedly downplayed the lab-leak hypothesis in public statements and television interviews, calling it a fringe theory even as intelligence analysts were, according to Erdman, independently reaching the opposite conclusion behind closed doors.
Gabbard's Deadline and What Comes Next
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who resigned in May to care for her husband and leaves office June 30, is racing to declassify additional COVID-origins material before her departure. An ODNI official confirmed she is actively working to release the records in weekly installments through the end of the month. During her roughly 15-month tenure, Gabbard's office oversaw the declassification of more than 500,000 pages of government records.
Paul has also called Fauci to testify before HSGAC, with a transcribed interview planned this month. Separately, the committee has uncovered evidence that Fauci deleted official government records, a charge with its own legal implications. Whether Fauci complies, and what Gabbard's final installments reveal, will set the terms for every COVID accountability fight this Congress takes on.
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