Newly obtained documents show Anthony Fauci instructed a subordinate to permanently delete an official government email exchange in which he attacked a journalist who warned that NIH-funded research could unleash a man-made pandemic, a directive that may have violated federal record-keeping law.
The Daily Caller News Foundation reported that the emails, sent from Fauci's NIH account in March 2012, capture the then-director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases dismissing a New York Times science author's warnings about a deadly engineered bird flu virus, and then ordering the entire exchange wiped from the record. The instruction was blunt: "Please delete this e-mail and then delete from the deleted file."
That second step, purging the message from the trash folder, goes beyond a casual cleanup. It describes a deliberate effort to make the correspondence unrecoverable, the kind of action that federal law treats seriously. The statute governing destruction of government records, 18 U.S.C. § 2071, makes it a crime to willfully conceal, remove, or destroy official documents.
The chain of events began in late 2011, when Dutch virologist Ron Fouchier used NIH funding to engineer an airborne strain of bird flu, a pathogen with an estimated 50 percent fatality rate. Fouchier himself described his creation as "probably one of the most dangerous viruses you can make."
In December 2011, Fauci, NIH Director Francis Collins, and colleague Gary Nabel co-authored a Washington Post op-ed arguing that the risks of such research were worth taking. Weeks later, in January 2012, New York Times science author Phil Boffey fired back with an un-bylined op-ed calling the experiment an "engineered doomsday" that could kill "hundreds of millions of people."
"The consequences, should the virus escape, are too devastating to risk."
That was Boffey's conclusion. Fauci did not take it well.
On March 4, 2012, the same day Boffey published a follow-up piece titled "The Truth About the Doomsday Virus?", Fauci emailed Collins to complain. "Phil Boffey is really off base here," Fauci wrote. "He is acting like a mischievous guy."
The next morning, Fauci forwarded the exchange to an unnamed subordinate with sharper language: "Clearly, people are getting to Phil Boffey and he is swallowing it." Then came the deletion order.
Neither Fauci nor Boffey responded to the Daily Caller News Foundation's request for comment.
The deletion instruction is damaging on its own. It becomes far more consequential when measured against Fauci's sworn statements to Congress. In 2024, Fauci testified before a congressional committee that he had never deleted official government records. Sen. Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican, has since identified at least two additional instances in 2020 where Fauci apparently sought to destroy official communications.
One of those instances, as the New York Post reported, involved a February 2, 2020 email to Collins in which Fauci wrote: "Please delete this e-mail after you read it." That message followed a key conference call about COVID-19 origins. When Rep. James Comer later asked Fauci point-blank, "Dr. Fauci, did you ever delete an official record?", Fauci answered: "No."
The 2012 documents now push that pattern back eight years earlier, well before the pandemic made Fauci a household name. The question is no longer whether Fauci sought to destroy records once under pressure. The documents suggest it was a long-standing practice.
Paul has pressed hard on the accountability front. He pushed publicly for Fauci's prosecution and subpoenaed the former NIH official to testify before his Senate committee.
When Fauci did appear before Paul's committee, he declined to answer questions more than 100 times by invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, AP News reported. Paul responded by announcing a contempt vote for the following week.
"Today will be the capstone to Anthony Fauci's 40 years of abuse of power at NIH."
That was Paul's assessment. Fauci countered that the hearing's sole purpose was to extract a statement that could "vindicate" Paul's public pledges to see him "behind bars." The Senate committee ultimately voted to hold Fauci in contempt. Fauci had received a pardon from President Biden in early 2025, though Republicans have argued perjury charges from the hearing itself could still apply.
Fauci was not the only NIH official accused of dodging transparency requirements. His senior adviser, David Morens, was placed on administrative leave and later removed from his NIH position after emails surfaced showing he routinely used a personal Gmail account to conduct sensitive government business.
Morens was explicit about his motives. "I always try to communicate over Gmail because my NIH email is FOIA'd constantly," he wrote in one message, as Newsmax reported. In another: "I will delete anything I don't want to see in The New York Times."
A July 2021 email from Morens went further, stating that Fauci did not "want his fingerprints on origin stories", a reference to the politically explosive question of whether COVID-19 leaked from a laboratory. Morens admitted under congressional testimony that he never explored scientific evidence supporting the lab leak theory, even as the FBI and the Department of Energy concluded the virus likely originated in a Wuhan lab.
Morens's case eventually reached a criminal conclusion. His guilty plea to conspiracy charges for hiding COVID-19 records confirmed that the culture of evasion inside Fauci's orbit was not a matter of interpretation, it was a matter of law.
House Republicans, meanwhile, pressed NIH leadership on Morens's conduct. A Washington Examiner report detailed how the investigation expanded across multiple congressional committees, with subpoenas threatened against then-HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra. A CIA whistleblower also alleged that potential bribery influenced the agency's assessment that COVID-19 did not originate from a lab-related incident.
Emails obtained by a House subcommittee showed Morens used his personal account to discuss COVID-19 origins with Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance, the organization that funneled taxpayer grants to gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, National Review reported.
The newly obtained 2012 emails also cast a sharper light on the relationship between Fauci and Fouchier, a relationship that resurfaced with far higher stakes when COVID-19 emerged eight years later.
Fouchier, the same virologist whose engineered bird flu terrified biosecurity experts in 2012, ghostwrote a key argument in "The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2," the influential paper that dismissed the possibility COVID-19 came from a laboratory. Fauci frequently cited that paper and its authors without disclosing that he had collaborated with them behind the scenes.
Documents obtained by U.S. Right to Know shed light on Fouchier's motivations. One unnamed author of the paper wrote that "Ron... is not going to want it to be a GOF escape", meaning Fouchier had a personal stake in ensuring gain-of-function research was not blamed for the pandemic. Fouchier himself said the paper would be "much stronger" if it avoided addressing a possible lab origin, warning that doing so could lead to "harm to science" through renewed biosafety debates.
"This manuscript would be much stronger if it focused on the likelihood of the first two scenarios as compared to intentional or accidental release. That would also limit the chance of new biosafety discussions that would unnecessarily obstruct future attempts of virus culturing for research and diagnostic purposes for any (emerging/zoonotic) virus."
In plain English: Fouchier wanted the paper to steer public discussion away from a lab leak, not because the science demanded it, but because honest debate might impose new safety rules on his own work. Fauci then used that paper as a public shield, citing it repeatedly to dismiss lab-leak concerns. Even Sen. John Fetterman later admitted he was wrong to dismiss the lab leak theory.
Back in 2012, Fauci had also worked to override his own agency's biosecurity advisors. The National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity initially recommended against publishing the full details of Fouchier's bird flu experiment. Fauci pushed back hard, warning that if the advisors did not reverse course, "the field of research on influenza... has a serious problem." They reversed course.
The 2012 deletion order fits a pattern that extends well beyond record-keeping. Fauci's public posture, confident, authoritative, dismissive of critics, repeatedly diverged from what he said and did in private. He co-authored an op-ed calling dangerous virus research a "risk worth taking," then tried to destroy an email exchange about a journalist who disagreed. He cited a paper dismissing the lab leak theory without disclosing his role in shaping it. He told Congress he never deleted records while documents show he asked subordinates to do exactly that.
That gap between Fauci's public statements and his private conduct is not a matter of nuance or interpretation. It is documented, repeated, and, in the case of his senior adviser, now a matter of criminal record.
No current legal or investigative consequences for Fauci himself have been announced in connection with the 2012 deletion instruction. How the Daily Caller News Foundation obtained the documents, whether through a backup recovery, a Freedom of Information Act request, or another channel, remains unclear. So does whether the unnamed subordinate carried out Fauci's order.
When the most powerful public-health official in the country treats government records like personal property, kept or destroyed at his convenience, accountability is not optional. It is overdue.
