Senate Homeland Security Chairman Rand Paul says his committee has found fresh evidence that a former aide to Dr. Anthony Fauci destroyed government records, and that previously unknown gain-of-function research programs surfaced in Fauci's communications.
Paul disclosed the findings during a wide-ranging interview on the Just the News, No Noise television show on Wednesday, hours after his committee failed to pass a measure that would have granted prosecutorial immunity to the unnamed former aide. Democrats on the panel blocked the vote, which required a two-thirds supermajority to pass. Without that immunity, the aide, who appeared before the committee the previous Friday, flanked by lawyers, continues to invoke her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
The Kentucky Republican told Just the News that investigators found the evidence by examining logs Fauci kept on a government computer, along with his emails, phone records, and diary.
Paul described the discovery in blunt terms:
"By looking at Anthony Fauci's logs that he was keeping on a government computer, we discovered that his assistant was bragging to him in one of the emails. 'Hey, Dr. Fauci, I was able to destroy tons of your emails this weekend.' Well, that's illegal."
Government emails between executive-branch employees are generally required to be preserved under the Federal Records Act, the federal law that mandates agencies maintain official correspondence. Paul said his committee wanted to question the aide about who ordered the deletions, how many years the practice continued, whether hundreds or thousands of emails were destroyed, and what topics they covered.
The aide's decision to plead the Fifth put the committee in a bind. Paul said his team never intended to seek an indictment of the aide herself. The goal, he explained, was to offer her immunity so she would identify who gave the orders, and Paul said he presumes that person is Fauci.
"We presume Anthony Fauci. How many years she'd been doing this? Whether it was hundreds or thousands of emails? What kind of topics? And so, really, we're more interested in the guy who gave the orders because I think that's where most of the culpability is."
The pattern Paul describes is not new to the Fauci orbit. During a July 29 hearing earlier this year, Paul presented evidence that Fauci had instructed then-NIH Director Francis Collins to "delete this email after you read it" on February 2, 2020. At that same hearing, Paul told Fauci directly: "It is a crime to destroy federal records. Yet our investigation reveals your assistant diligently reported that she deleted tons of emails in 2024."
Fauci's former senior adviser, Dr. David Morens, has already been indicted by federal prosecutors for concealing and destroying federal records. Emails obtained by a House subcommittee showed Morens boasting about learning how to make emails "disappear" before Freedom of Information Act searches. In one message, Morens wrote: "I learned from our FOIA lady here how to make emails disappear after I am FOIA'd, but before the search starts. So I think we are all safe. Plus I deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to Gmail."
In another message, Morens told a correspondent: "Don't worry, just send to any of my addresses, and I will delete anything I don't want to see in the New York Times." Morens also used personal Gmail accounts to sidestep FOIA requests and shared internal FOIA information with EcoHealth Alliance president Dr. Peter Daszak. That guilty plea underscored how deeply the records-destruction problem ran inside Fauci's circle at the National Institutes of Health.
With Democrats preventing the two-thirds majority needed to grant the former aide immunity, Paul said he plans to refer her to the Department of Justice within one to two weeks if she does not cooperate voluntarily. The Washington Examiner reported that Democrats voted against securing a court order that would have granted the assistant immunity to share information about Fauci's alleged illegal activity, a move that effectively shielded Fauci from the testimony Paul was trying to unlock.
Paul framed the DOJ route as the more direct path. Unlike the committee, the Justice Department does not need a supermajority vote to offer immunity or to pursue charges.
"Within a week or two, if we don't get that cooperation, what's going to happen is she will be referred to the Department of Justice.... They don't have to vote on indicting someone. They don't have to vote on offering someone immunity."
Paul described this as standard prosecutorial practice: grant immunity to lower-level figures to build a case against the person who gave the orders. "It's a typical way prosecutors act," he said. "You give immunity to the lower echelon people to get them to give information on who was giving the illegal orders to them."
Paul's committee had already referred Fauci himself to the Justice Department for possible prosecution for contempt of Congress. But President Biden granted Fauci a pardon in the waning days of his term, shielding the retired official from criminal liability. Constitutional experts have argued that Fauci's pardon actually strips him of the right to invoke the Fifth Amendment, since the amendment protects against self-incrimination, and a pardoned individual faces no criminal jeopardy. Yet Fauci invoked the Fifth 111 times during the July 29 hearing, citing what he called Paul's "unhinged obsession" with him.
Beyond the records destruction, Paul said the investigation has turned up evidence of gain-of-function research programs, experiments that enhance a pathogen's transmissibility or lethality, that his committee did not previously know existed. Paul promised more details in the coming days.
"We will have some more explosive information that comes out in the next week, though, that some of the communications between Anthony Fauci and his assistant involved some programs that are very worrisome, gain-of-function programs that we didn't know existed until we came across these emails."
Paul said he believes most ongoing gain-of-function research is classified and falls under the bioweapons or biodefense category, but that the agencies involved refuse to share details with his committee. "It is our belief that most of the gain-of-function research that's going on, and probably still goes on, is classified and done in the bioweapons or biodefense category, but they won't tell us," he said.
That secrecy, Paul argued, means no independent scientists with a skeptical eye are reviewing whether the experiments should be conducted at all. He pointed to the risk of laboratory accidents as the core danger, not deliberate release.
"There are certain experiments where you're creating viruses that are more transmissible through the air that are a death wish. It's not that I suspect our government's going to release it on purpose. I suspect an accident will happen."
Fauci's own diary, released earlier this year, revealed a sharp gap between what he knew privately and what he told the public. A National Review report on the 1,141 pages of diary entries showed that during a February 1, 2020, call with 12 scientists, 10 of them felt "deliberate insertion was possible" regarding COVID-19's origin. Eight days later, Fauci publicly dismissed the lab-leak theory as a conspiracy. His diary also recorded the COVID mortality rate at 0.2 to 0.3 percent, yet one month later, he testified before Congress that the rate was between 1 and 3 percent, or ten times more lethal than the flu.
Fauci's diary further showed he privately held information that contradicted his public reassurances on multiple fronts, including his role in convincing officials like New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and California Governor Gavin Newsom to close schools and businesses in March 2020, despite later telling The Hill he "didn't recommend locking anything down."
Paul also accused a fellow Republican of obstructing his investigation. He said Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Tom Cotton of Arkansas has actively worked to prevent Paul's committee from accessing classified information about the gain-of-function programs in question.
"There's an internal fight in Congress. So Tom Cotton is the chairman of the Intelligence Committee. He is doing everything he possibly can to prevent us from getting information about these programs. He has written to the Director of National Intelligence and said that he does not want any information shared with our committee."
Paul said Cotton's position would force all requests for classified material to flow through the Intelligence Committee, where Cotton could decide at his own discretion what, if anything, to share. Paul argued that arrangement leaves dangerous research without meaningful oversight.
"There is so much classified going on, and there has to be adults in the room. It can't be well, 'China's doing it, so we're going to do it.' That's essentially what the rule of thumb has been."
Cotton has not publicly responded to Paul's allegations. The Director of National Intelligence has not commented on the letter Paul described.
Fauci, for his part, has denied wrongdoing. In previous congressional testimony, he called the accusation that he bribed scientists with grant money to change their conclusions "absolutely false, and simply preposterous." He also denied covering up the possibility of a lab origin for COVID-19, saying "the truth is exactly the opposite." But those denials now sit alongside a growing pile of evidence, diary entries, deleted emails, an indicted adviser, and an aide who won't talk, that tells a different story.
When a retired government official hides behind a pardon, his closest aide pleads the Fifth, his senior adviser pleads guilty to destroying records, and a fellow senator fights to keep the classified files locked away, the American public is entitled to wonder what, exactly, all these people are so determined to keep hidden.
