Sen. Rand Paul has issued a subpoena compelling Anthony Fauci to testify publicly before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, setting a July 29 hearing date after the former health official backed out of a voluntary appearance he had previously agreed to. Paul, who chairs the committee, declared on Fox News that Fauci "will answer to the American people" and described the investigation into COVID-19 origins as entering a new phase with broader access to government records.
The Kentucky Republican's move marks the first subpoena he has issued as committee chairman, and it comes after years of public confrontations between Paul and Fauci over whether U.S. taxpayer dollars funded the kind of dangerous gain-of-function research that may have sparked a pandemic responsible for more than 1.2 million American deaths.
Fauci has previously denied that the National Institutes of Health funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. On May 11, 2021, he told Congress directly: "The NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology," as the New York Post reported. Paul now says the documentary record tells a different story.
Paul laid out the sequence on Fox News's Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo. His committee had been negotiating with Fauci for both documents and testimony. Those negotiations, Paul said, dragged on for months.
"We've been negotiating with him for material and for testimony. This has gone on for some time. He slow-walked us."
Then Fauci pulled out. Just The News reported that Fauci notified the committee he would not voluntarily testify despite having previously agreed to do so. Paul responded the same day with a formal subpoena requiring a public appearance.
Paul posted the announcement on X on June 28, 2026: "Anthony Fauci will answer to the American people. 7/29 at 10 AM."
The senator made clear he does not intend to let Fauci run out the clock. On Fox News, he framed the stakes in terms that left little room for ambiguity, telling Bartiromo that the investigation has been going on for several years and that the Biden administration's refusal to hand over documents had stalled progress.
"The investigation of COVID origins has been going on for several years. The Biden administration's stubbornness wouldn't give us any of the documents. The Trump administration has been very cooperative; they've turned over virtually everything."
The subpoena does not exist in a vacuum. It follows the declassification of a several-hundred-page intelligence report on Fauci, released by former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on her last day in office. Those ODNI documents, as Newsmax reported, allegedly show that Fauci briefed intelligence officials and recommended experts who supported a natural-origin theory for COVID-19, even as he publicly denied knowledge of such discussions in sworn congressional testimony in 2024.
Gabbard accused Fauci of "manipulating intelligence" and "lying to Congress," stating that "the American people deserve transparency, truth, and accountability."
The declassified files also revealed a whistleblower complaint, filed during the Biden administration, alleging Fauci lied to Congress about NIH funding of gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab. Lying to Congress is a federal crime punishable by up to five years in prison. The declassified memos showed that Biden administration officials diverted that whistleblower complaint rather than acting on it, a detail that raises its own set of troubling questions about whether the prior administration actively shielded Fauci from accountability.
Whistleblowers also allegedly testified that intelligence analysts who challenged the natural-origin theory faced retaliation and career consequences, painting a picture of an institutional environment where dissent was punished rather than explored.
Paul told Bartiromo that the evidence now points overwhelmingly toward a laboratory origin for COVID-19. He cited what he described as an internal CIA assessment.
"A scientific commission within the CIA voted 6 to 1 to say it came from the lab."
Paul alleged that this position later shifted under pressure, though he did not specify in his Fox News appearance exactly who applied that pressure or when. Breitbart noted that the CIA adjusted its stance in 2025, assessing with "low confidence" that a research-related origin of COVID-19 is more likely than a natural origin.
The senator also alleged that Fauci privately acknowledged early in 2020 that the virus likely did not originate at a Wuhan wet market, a claim that, if documented, would contradict the public messaging that dominated the early pandemic response. Paul described the entire episode in blunt terms: "This was all misdirection. This was a conspiracy."
Federal health agencies have maintained that grant oversight procedures were followed, though which agencies made that assertion and in what specific context remains unclear from available reporting.
Meanwhile, Rep. Darrell Issa has separately demanded a perjury investigation and criminal charges against Fauci in light of the declassified documents, adding congressional pressure from the House side as well.
One of the most politically charged elements of this saga is the preemptive pardon that former President Joe Biden issued for Fauci in his final hours in office. Paul characterized it as a "ten-year pardon on nonspecific crimes", a sweeping grant of clemency that, in Paul's view, was designed to insulate Fauci from exactly the kind of legal consequences his investigation might produce.
Paul has suggested the legality of that pardon could be challenged in court, though he did not specify the legal basis for such a challenge during his Fox News appearance. The question of whether a preemptive pardon covering unspecified offenses can withstand judicial scrutiny is one that legal scholars have debated but courts have not definitively resolved.
Paul and Sen. Ron Johnson have already pressed the Trump Justice Department to challenge Fauci's pardon in court, arguing that the American public deserves a definitive answer on whether a departing president can effectively grant blanket immunity for conduct that may include lying under oath to Congress.
With the Trump administration cooperating and documents flowing, Paul says the picture has sharpened considerably. He told Bartiromo that the evidence now meets a high bar.
"What we know now, beyond a reasonable doubt, is that Anthony Fauci did, indeed, fund gain-of-function research."
Paul described that research as making viruses "more lethal, more attachable to human cells, and more infectious." The World Health Organization has attributed more than 7 million deaths worldwide to COVID-19, with more than 1.2 million of those in the United States alone. Paul himself cited a figure of 15 million deaths in his Fox News remarks, a number that exceeds the WHO's official tally and was not reconciled within his statements.
Regardless of which figure one uses, the scale of death and disruption is not in dispute. What remains in dispute, and what the July 29 hearing is designed to address, is whether the man who served as America's most prominent public health official during the crisis bears direct responsibility for funding the research that may have caused it, and whether he lied to Congress about it.
Paul made his intentions plain. He wants the historical record set, and he wants consequences.
"He has not really gotten his just desserts on this, and we want to make sure that the American public and that history records that he was involved with funding this dangerous research that led to a pandemic that killed 15 million people; there needs to be repercussions."
The subpoena now forces the question into the open. Fauci can comply and testify under oath, or he can fight the subpoena in court, a move that would carry its own political and legal costs. Either way, the era of slow-walking, dodging voluntary requests, and hiding behind a blanket pardon appears to be closing.
Several critical questions remain unanswered. Fauci has not publicly responded to the subpoena or to Paul's most recent statements. It is unclear whether he will appear, invoke legal protections, or attempt to quash the subpoena. The specific documents the Trump administration has turned over have not been publicly detailed. And the legal viability of Biden's preemptive pardon, should Fauci face criminal referral, remains untested.
What is clear is that the investigation has moved from rhetoric to compulsory process. Paul has the gavel, the subpoena power, and, he says, the documents. Fauci has a pardon of uncertain scope and a record of public denials that declassified files now appear to contradict.
The American people lost more than a million of their own to this pandemic. They deserve to hear, under oath and on the record, from the man who stood at the center of the federal response. If Fauci has nothing to hide, July 29 should be easy.
