Autopen pardons aside, the nation deserves answers on the Fauci files

On June 19, Tulsi Gabbard, the decorated Army combat veteran and former Democratic presidential candidate, used her final day as Director of National Intelligence to drop a grenade.

Gabbard declassified hundreds of pages of communications and documents that suggest Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, allegedly manipulated the intelligence community to misinform the public about COVID-19 and its origins.

The documents appear to bolster longstanding claims that Fauci had funded dangerous viral gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. As COVID began to spread, he worked with politicized factions within the U.S. intelligence community to suppress evidence that the pandemic was the result of a lab leak. He allegedly lied about this under oath before Congress in 2024.

In announcing the release, Gabbard referred to it as “years of lies, censorship, and cover-ups.” If she is right, then this isn’t a political controversy — it’s a crime scene.

The documents reveal that, during a 90-day presidential review of COVID origins ordered by President Joe Biden in 2021, Fauci repeatedly steered intelligence analysts toward his preferred experts, including co-authors of the “Proximal Origin” paper arguing for a natural-animal origin. Internal emails show an official writing that “Dr. Fauci recommended that the [intelligence community] reach out to the below individuals” — the ones who co-authored that same paper.

So the man whose institute had funded the research under investigation was also helping choose who would review it. That does not sound like peer review — it sounds more like a cover-up.

Intelligence analysts saw it. Senior analysts flagged a deep institutional conflict of interest and........

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