Tulsi Goes Out on a High Note - Trashing Fauci
Segment #948
On June 19, 2026—her final day as the Director of National Intelligence (DNI)—Tulsi Gabbard released a major tranche of newly declassified documents and internal communications from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).
The release centers entirely on Dr. Anthony Fauci's actions regarding the origins of COVID-19, federal research funding, and his interactions with the U.S. intelligence community. Gabbard framed the declassification as a victory for public transparency against what she termed "the deep state playbook."
The declassified documents layout three core allegations regarding Fauci's conduct:
Funding "Gain-of-Function" Research
To understand exactly how the ODNI documents construct the case against Fauci on gain-of-function (GoF) funding, you have to look at the paper trail connecting the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
The newly released files map out the specific mechanisms used to route U.S. taxpayer dollars into these high-risk experiments.
The Funding Pathway & The Intermediary
The documents details how millions of dollars did not go directly from NIAID to the Chinese lab. Instead, they traveled through an intermediary organization called the EcoHealth Alliance, led by Peter Daszak.
According to the declassified grants:
The Core Grant: NIAID approved a multi-million dollar grant titled "Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence."
The Sub-award: EcoHealth Alliance funneled a significant portion of this grant money directly to the WIV to map out and experiment on bat coronaviruses collected from caves in southern China.
Redefining "Gain-of-Function" to Bypass the Moratorium
A central revelation in the ODNI release involves how Fauci and senior NIAID officials allegedly bypassed federal safety guardrails.
In October 2014, the Obama administration placed a formal pause (moratorium) on federal funding for gain-of-function research involving influenza, SARS, and MERS viruses due to safety concerns. However, internal emails from 2015 included in the release show NIAID officials working closely with contracted scientists to narrow the functional definition of "gain-of-function."
By altering the internal definition framework (specifically bypassing the P3CO oversight framework), NIAID effectively allowed the EcoHealth/WIV research to continue. The justification used was that the wild bat coronaviruses being engineered had not yet been proven to infect humans, meaning the experiments technically fell outside the strict legal wording of the funding ban.
What the WIV Experiments Actually Did
The declassified progress reports submitted by EcoHealth to Fauci’s agency outline the exact genetic engineering taking place at the Wuhan lab:
Chimeric Virus Creation: Researchers took the genetic "backbone" of a known, non-lethal bat coronavirus and replaced its spike proteins (the part of the virus that binds to cells) with spike proteins from newly discovered wild viruses.
Humanized Mice Testing: These newly created, synthetic "chimeric" viruses were then tested on "humanized mice"—laboratory mice genetically engineered to have human lung receptors (ACE2).
Enhanced Viral Growth: The WIV's own progress reports showed that some of these modified chimeric viruses grew up to 10,000 times faster and were significantly more lethal in the humanized mice than the original, natural virus.
The Smoking Gun in the ODNI Case: Under NIH guidelines, if a funded experiment accidentally increases viral growth or infectivity by more than 10-fold (1 log), the researchers are legally required to immediately halt the experiment and report it for emergency safety reviews. The documents show the WIV experiments blew past this threshold, but the research was kept active, and funding continued to flow.
The Direct Link to the Lab-Leak Hypothesis
The ODNI release uses these declassified timelines to argue that the U.S. government directly subsidized the precise molecular biology techniques required to create a pathogen like SARS-CoV-2.
Because Fauci's agency permitted these experiments to occur under lower-tier Biosafety Level 2 (BSL-2) conditions at Wuhan—rather than the maximum security BSL-4 environment required for airborne human pathogens—the ODNI concludes that the U.S. funded the exact environment and research that made an accidental lab leak highly probable.
Constructing a "Circular Reporting Loop
The specific declassified emails and files within the ODNI release chart the mechanics of the "circular reporting loop" and detail the alleged intimidation of dissenting analysts.
The documents outline a coordinated effort to control information, utilizing specific channels and personnel to direct the narrative.
Planting the "Unbiased Guides"
The declassified paper trail highlights how the intelligence community's early posture on COVID-19 origins was shaped by an hand-picked group of outside experts. The ODNI files show that senior leadership within specific intelligence divisions actively sought out Fauci's recommendations for scientific consultants.
Fauci provided a select group of virologists—many of whom were actively receiving multi-million dollar grants from Fauci’s agency, NIAID. Internally, intelligence community managers praised Fauci for offering what they labeled an "unbiased guide to the real coronavirus experts."
The Laundering of "Proximal Origin"
A core piece of evidence in the declassified files is the internal communication surrounding the landmark scientific paper "The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2," published in Nature Medicine in March 2020, which famously declared that a laboratory origin was not plausible.
The ODNI documents expose the following pipeline:
The Ghost Authorship: Internal emails show Fauci and his close associates helping to draft, edit, and steer the direction of the Proximal Origin paper behind the scenes.
The Intelligence Injection: Once written, Fauci formally submitted this exact paper to the intelligence community as a legitimate, independent piece of scientific evidence for analysts to use in their evaluations.
The Exclusion: While integrating this paper, senior agency leadership actively blocked dissenting scientists—including those specializing in biosafety, bioweapons, and genetic engineering—from presenting conflicting data to the analysts.
Closing the Loop - The Fauci Strategy
The declassified documents specifically focus on how the "public victory lap" was executed to permanently cement the natural-origin narrative. The ODNI files track a highly synchronized media strategy designed to weaponize selective intelligence and pre-written science simultaneously.
Orchestrating the White House Debut
The documents reveal that on April 17, 2020—just weeks after the Proximal Origin paper was published—Dr. Fauci used a White House Coronavirus Task Force press briefing to establish the "scientific consensus" to the public.
When a reporter asked if the virus could have originated in a Wuhan lab, Fauci took the podium and pointed directly to the paper as independent confirmation:
"There was a study recently... where a group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists looked at the sequences here and the sequences in bats as they evolve. And the mutations that it took to get to the point where it is now is totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human."
Fauci explicitly omitted his own direct involvement in organizing, editing, and greenlighting that exact paper during a conference call on February 1, 2020. Internal ODNI memos notes that Fauci presented the paper as an objective, third-party validation to maximize its authority.
Dual-Track Verification
The core of the "closing the loop" strategy was that Fauci and executive branch officials used two separate tracks of authority to protect one another:
[ Fauci & NIAID ] ──(Drafted & Funded)──> [ Proximal Origin Paper ]
│ │
(Guided Analysts) (Cited as Fact)
▼ ▼
[ Intel Appraisals ] ◄──(Mirrored Narrative)─── [ Public Consensus ]
Censorship and Deflection
The ODNI files include communications between public health officials and major technology platforms. Once the public loop was established, the "scientific consensus" label was used to justify institutional actions:
Social Media Suppression: The declassified logs show that executive branch officials routinely sent requests to social media platforms to flag, de-monetize, or shadow-ban accounts discussing the lab-leak hypothesis, citing the intelligence community's stance and the Proximal Origin study as baseline truth.
Dismissing "Conspiracy Theories": Publicly, Fauci used media appearances to frame the lab-leak hypothesis not as a competing scientific theory, but as an attack on science itself, leveraging the engineered consensus to insulate his own agency from oversight.
The ODNI tranche concludes that this coordinated public-facing operation effectively shut down mainstream investigation into U.S.-funded research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology for over a year, achieving the primary objective of the circular loop.
Whistleblower Testimonies: Suppression of Dissent
The declassified memos and transcripts pinpoint exactly how dissent was neutralized within the lower and mid-tier levels of the intelligence apparatus. Whistleblower testimonies—most notably from CIA Senior Operations Officer James E. Erdman III during congressional hearings—reveal that institutional pushback wasn't just passive disagreement; it was an active enforcement mechanism.
The ODNI documents expose the specific tactics used by management to ensure compliance:
Weaponization of Security Clearances
The files reveal a pattern of "administrative intimidation." According to Erdman's declassified testimony, analysts who formally presented evidence pointing toward a laboratory origin at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) were called into closed-door meetings with senior agency supervisors.
The warnings given to these analysts were highly specific:
Managers stated that aggressively pursuing the lab-leak hypothesis would "compromise critical interagency relationships" between the intelligence community and federal health departments like Health and Human Services (HHS) and the NIH.
Analysts were told that questioning the "established scientific consensus" provided by Dr. Fauci's curated experts cast doubt on their analytical objectivity. In the intelligence community, a formal notation that an analyst lacks objective judgment is often used as a bureaucratic precursor to suspend or revoke a Top Secret/SCI security clearance, effectively ending a career.
The Redaction and "Burial" of Reports
The declassified paper trail demonstrates how specific intelligence products supporting a lab-leak conclusion were systematically scrubbed before reaching high-level policymakers.
Whistleblowers provided evidence showing that between 2021 and 2023, CIA and DIA scientific analysts concluded multiple times that a laboratory accident was the most likely origin of COVID-19. However, senior leadership utilized the internal review process to suppress these findings:
Indefinite Review Delays: Draft reports highlighting the WIV’s safety failures or genetic sequencing anomalies were kept in "perpetual peer review," preventing them from being finalized.
Omission from the PDB: When these findings were forced into briefing materials, senior managers heavily redacted the strongest biological evidence. As a result, when the final assessments reached the President's Daily Brief (PDB), the lab-leak hypothesis was presented as a fringe, "low-confidence" minority view, while the natural-origin theory was elevated.
Punitive Reassignments
For the technical analysts who refused to back down, institutional retaliation took the form of professional displacement. The ODNI tranche contains internal personnel routing logs showing that several veteran bioweapons and structural biology analysts were abruptly transferred.
Instead of continuing their investigations into global pathogen risks, these specialists were reassigned to unrelated, lower-priority portfolios—such as tracking conventional military supply chains or monitoring regional geopolitical updates. This tactic effectively stripped them of their oversight capabilities, removed their access to incoming pandemic data streams, and ensured they could no longer influence the intelligence community's official analytical outputs.
The Structural Objective: The declassified files emphasize that this top-down suppression was designed to create an artificial consensus. By intimidating, filtering, and reassigning the actual scientific experts within the intelligence community, senior officials ensured that the intelligence assessments provided to Congress and the public would never expose the U.S. government's funding of dangerous research at the Wuhan lab.
To see a broader breakdown of how these newly declassified documents are shifting the debate on government transparency and overseas pathogen research, watch this News Report on Senator Rand Paul's Call for Biolab Scrutiny. This coverage details the legislative push to investigate the multi-agency cover-up exposed by the ODNI files.
Misleading Congress Under Oath
The declassified communications released by Tulsi Gabbard explicitly zero in on the June 3, 2024, testimony of Dr. Anthony Fauci before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.
The ODNI documents aim to prove that Fauci did not merely misspeak, but deliberately concealed a long-standing, active relationship with the intelligence community regarding global pathogen research and the origins of COVID-19.
The Sworn Testimony vs. Declassified Log
During the 2024 hearing, congressional investigators pushed Fauci to clarify whether he had leveraged his proximity to intelligence agencies to sway their early assessments. The exact exchange, now contrasted against the declassified material, forms the basis of the legal charge:
Committee Query:"Did you communicate with, brief, or advise the CIA, FBI, or other elements of the Intelligence Community regarding viral research or the origins of the pandemic?"
Dr. Fauci's Sworn Response:"Not to my knowledge about COVID."
The declassified tranche directly challenges this claim by releasing a multi-year communication log, showing that Fauci was a frequent, high-level participant in intelligence community deliberations.
What the Newly Released Communications Reveal
The declassified documents layout direct points of contact that run counter to Fauci's "not to my knowledge" defense:
Pre-Pandemic Briefings: Records show Fauci frequently communicated with intelligence officials prior to 2020 regarding overseas biological risks. Most notably, internal memos from 2015 show Fauci discussing the modification of gain-of-function definitions with scientists under contract with the intelligence community to lift the federal funding pause.
The February 2020 Pivot: The files expose direct emails and scheduled secure calls between Fauci and senior analysts at the CIA and DIA immediately following his February 1, 2020, secret teleconference. These logs indicate Fauci was actively guiding analysts toward the natural-origin hypothesis while the intelligence community was formulating its initial response.
The Declassified CIA Infiltration: Whistleblower testimonies from within the CIA's Declassification and Intelligence Group (DIG) reveal that Fauci didn't just speak with agencies casually; he actively recommended a curated list of "Subject Matter Experts" (SMEs) to the CIA. These experts were the same NIAID-funded scientists who authored the Proximal Origin paper.
Legal Reality: The Pre-Emptive Pardon
In standard legal proceedings, lying to Congress under oath violates 18 U.S. Code § 1001 (Making False Statements) and 18 U.S. Code § 1621 (Perjury), both of which carry federal prison sentences of up to five years per count.
However, the ODNI release acknowledges that the paper trail cannot lead to criminal prosecution due to the final actions of the previous administration.
The Biden Pardon (January 2025): During his final hours in office, former President Joe Biden issued a broad, pre-emptive federal pardon to Dr. Fauci. A pre-emptive pardon shields an individual from federal prosecution for any specific past actions, even if definitive evidence of a crime—such as perjury—is uncovered at a later date.
Consequently, while the Gabbard release provides the documentation required to construct a perjury case, the pardon acts as an absolute legal firewall against federal indictment. The ODNI concludes that the release serves as an effort for public transparency and historical accountability rather than a mechanism for criminal sentencing.
Fauci’s Pardon Date January 2025 - Immunity and His Pardon Ends
You are exactly right on the central legal premise: a presidential pardon cannot grant immunity for future crimes. Because President Biden’s preemptive pardon was signed in January 2025, it only covers potential offenses committed up to that specific date.
If Dr. Fauci is subpoenaed to testify before Congress again and is caught willfully lying under oath, that constitutes a brand-new offense (perjury or making false statements) completely outside the scope of the original pardon.
The legal strategy, leverage, and risks for both sides create a distinct set of considerations.
The Congressional & Prosecution Perspective
For congressional committees and federal prosecutors, a post-pardon subpoena fundamentally alters the rules of engagement, granting them an ironic piece of leverage:
The Loss of Fifth Amendment Protection: The Fifth Amendment protects individuals from self-incrimination. However, because the pardon eliminates any criminal jeopardy for Fauci’s actions between 2014 and January 2025, he can no longer claim the Fifth Amendment regarding those past events. Legally, he cannot argue that telling the truth will incriminate him for past actions, because he cannot be prosecuted for them.
Compelled Testimony: Because he cannot invoke the Fifth, Congress can legally compel him to answer direct, highly specific questions. If he refuses to answer, Congress can swiftly move to hold him in Contempt of Congress (2 U.S.C. § 192), which is a new post-pardon offense.
The "Clean Slate" Trap: Investigators can use previous testimony, newly uncovered emails, or depositions from former aides to ask highly precise, narrow questions. If his responses contradict the documentary evidence in a way that demonstrates intentional deceit, prosecutors have a straightforward case for perjury (18 U.S.C. § 1621) or false statements (18 U.S.C. § 1001).
The Defense & Fauci Perspective
For Dr. Fauci and his legal counsel, navigating a new round of testimony requires aggressive boundary-setting and a highly technical defense:
The "Perjury Trap" Defense: The defense would argue that the subpoena is not being issued for a legitimate legislative purpose, but rather as a political "perjury trap"—a deliberate attempt to force a witness into an environment where a minor memory lapse or phrasing discrepancy can be twisted into a felony charge.
The High Bar of Perjury Evidentiary Standards: To secure a post-pardon conviction, prosecutors must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Fauci willfully and knowingly made a materially false statement. The defense will lean heavily on the following:
Memory vs. Deceit: For a career spanning decades and involving thousands of directives, a contradiction can easily be attributed to faded memory rather than intentional lying.
Semantic and Scientific Ambiguity: As seen in prior hearings regarding "gain-of-function" research, definitions can be intensely subjective. If Fauci uses a strict National Institutes of Health (NIH) definition while Congress uses a broader colloquial or academic definition, the defense will argue there was no "knowing" lie, only a disagreement over technical terminology.
Narrow Assertions of the Fifth: While Fauci cannot plead the Fifth to avoid exposing past conduct covered by the pardon, his lawyers can advise him to plead the Fifth if a question is structured in a way that directly exposes him to a new, unpardoned vulnerability (for example, if a question touches on his actions or coordination with lawyers after January 2025).
Future Legal Probabilities
Evaluating the probability of Dr. Fauci being caught in or charged with a new crime after January 2025 isn't something that can be pinned down with a hard mathematical percentage, but we can look at the stark realities that push that probability either way.
Ultimately, it comes down to a clash between intense political pressure and a very high legal bar.
Factors Increasing the Probability
Subpoena Power and the Loss of the Fifth: Because the January 2025 pardon strips away his ability to plead the Fifth Amendment for anything that happened before that date, Congress has a powerful tool to force him to speak. If he is called back, he has to answer. This creates multiple opportunities for investigators to look for contradictions.
The "Contempt" Variable: If he refuses to answer questions based on the advice of his lawyers—perhaps arguing the questions are outside the scope of the committee or touch on privileged information—Congress can vote to hold him in Contempt of Congress. That refusal itself would be a new act occurring after January 2025.
Aggressive Oversight: There is immense political appetite among house committees to keep investigating the pandemic response, funding mechanisms, and institutional transparency. The sheer volume of scrutiny increases the likelihood that he will be put under oath again, which is the baseline requirement for a perjury charge to manifest.
Factors Decreasing the Probability
The Perjury Bar is High: To convict someone of perjury or making false statements, prosecutors have to prove intent—that he willfully and knowingly lied. It is incredibly difficult to legally prove that a contradiction is a deliberate lie rather than a failure of memory, a misinterpretation of a complex question, or a semantic disagreement over technical scientific terms (like the definition of "gain-of-function" research).
Retirement from Public Office: Dr. Fauci stepped down from his government roles at the end of 2022. Because he is no longer running an agency, signing official directives, or managing federal grants, his footprint for generating new official conduct or oversight targets after January 2025 is minimal to non-existent.
Expert Legal Counsel: Any future testimony would be meticulously prepared by top-tier legal defense teams. His strategy would likely involve giving highly precise, minimal answers ("I do not recall," or sticking strictly to narrow scientific definitions) to deny prosecutors the clear, unambiguous falsehood required for a post-pardon indictment.
The Takeaway: While the probability of him being subjected to intense questioning remains high due to the legal mechanics of the pardon, the probability of that questioning resulting in a successful prosecution for a new crime is comparatively low, simply because proving criminal intent under oath is one of the toughest mountains for federal prosecutors to climb.