Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) is calling on Dr. Anthony Fauci to appear again before the Senate after exposing emails from Fauci that conflict with statements he made before Congress.
Documents obtained by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee show that Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, directed his employees and others at the National Institutes of Health to destroy email records and other communications.
Paul on Wednesday posted the letter he sent to Fauci earlier this week requesting Fauci’s appearance before the Homeland Security committee, of which Paul is the chairman.
The letter outlines that, although Fauci testified to the House Oversight Committee last year that he did not destroy government records, in two emails dated February and July 2020, he asked fellow NIH employees to “please delete this e-mail after you read it.”
“These documents suggest your direct involvement in efforts to conceal information related to the Committee’s investigation and appear to contradict your previous testimony before Congress,” Paul wrote to Fauci.
Paul has been one of the leading voices in the Senate promoting the lab leak hypothesis, which states that the coronavirus originated from experiments on bat Coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.
Paul has referred Fauci to the Department of Justice twice for obstruction of justice and perjury for telling Congress that the NIH was not funding potentially dangerous experiments in China. U.S.-funded bat Coronavirus experiments came to light as a result of further congressional investigation.
The documentation Paul released on Wednesday would make for another instance in which Fauci could be presented with evidence that conflicts with his prior testimony.
Several NIH and NIAID employees had been implicated in potentially destroying government records to conceal the origins of the pandemic, but Paul’s revelations mark the first time Fauci has been directly connected to record deletion.
The House Oversight Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic uncovered that one of Fauci’s top aides and scientific advisers, David Morens, had been using his personal email address to avoid Freedom of Information Act requests.
Morens also, in various emails, referred to a “back channel” to get messages to Fauci. During his testimony before House Oversight, Morens referred to this and other quips in email correspondences as inside jokes made in regrettably poor taste.
Another one of Fauci’s aides, NIAID chief of staff Greg Folkers, intentionally misspelled words in emails to avoid FOIA requests and other evasion tactics.
Over the weekend, Paul posted on X an interview for the show The All-In Podcast discussing his book Deception: The Great COVID Cover-up. During the interview, Paul said that a cover-up or conspiracy does not need to consist of planning and organization but rather “a convergence of interests.”
“The convergence of interest in COVID was, ‘Holy crap, we funded this,’” Paul said in the taped interview.
On his last day in office, former President Joe Biden granted Fauci a preemptive pardon for all potential crimes committed between 2014 and his retirement from NIAID in 2023. At the time, it was unclear how the pardon would affect future requests from Congress to testify to events during the pandemic.
But Fauci’s pardon has been among several implicated in the ongoing investigation regarding the use of the autopen to sign pardons and executive orders during Biden’s term, adding a further complication.
RAND PAUL ‘RE-REFERS’ FAUCI TO DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE
In the letter, Paul requested various conversation records from personal and government devices regarding COVID-19 from between 2019 and 2023 to uncover more evidence.
Paul gave Fauci five sets of date windows in which to appear, between Oct. 28 and Dec. 11.
