Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard used her final day in office to release hundreds of pages of previously classified documents alleging that Dr. Anthony Fauci steered the intelligence community's assessment of COVID-19's origins, and then lied about it under oath. The documents, published Thursday evening, paint a picture of the nation's most powerful public health official quietly directing analysts toward his preferred experts and conclusions while publicly insisting he had no such involvement.
Fauci did not respond to a request for comment.
The declassified files cover ground that congressional investigators have circled for years, gain-of-function research funding, a buried whistleblower complaint, and weapons-lab analysts whose early warnings about a Wuhan lab accident were sidelined by intelligence community leadership. What makes this release different is the paper trail. Internal communications, briefing readouts, and inspector general records now carry no redaction stamps, and they tell a story the public was not supposed to see.
Among the most consequential revelations is the full scope of a classified report by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's Z Division, the Department of Energy's premier weapons analysis team, specialists in foreign weapons generation. By May 2020, barely five months into the pandemic, the Z Division had already reached a conclusion that most of the intelligence community would spend years avoiding.
Their assessment, now declassified, stated plainly:
"We assess that all the necessary conditions for an accidental release of a laboratory-modified coronavirus, specifically a coronavirus adapted to recognize human cells receptors, were present at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in mid-to-late 2019."
The Z Division team drew on both published scientific papers and what the documents describe as "additional intelligence information from a CIA Field Analytic Conversation." They identified a precursor virus at the Wuhan lab genetically similar enough to COVID-19 to support their finding. Yet higher-ups at the National Intelligence Council and the ODNI dismissed the biological weapons experts' conclusions, a pattern that extended to analysts at the FBI and the National Center for Medical Intelligence as well.
That dismissal is now harder to defend. The declassified files also contain intelligence allusions to researchers in Wuhan who fell ill with a respiratory virus in the fall of 2019, before the pandemic was publicly acknowledged. The documents do not include raw intelligence summaries on those cases, but the briefing readouts reference them clearly enough to raise the question of what IC leadership knew and when.
The declassified records trace Fauci's involvement in the intelligence community's COVID-origins work to at least May 2021, when the National Security Council briefed him on a Presidential Daily Brief titled "Worldwide: Origin of COVID-19 Pandemic Remains Elusive." That briefing came during President Biden's 90-day intelligence review of the pandemic's origins.
By June 2021, Fauci was doing more than receiving briefings. He advised the IC to consult Kristian Andersen, a Scripps Research virologist and lead author of "The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2", the March 2020 Nature Medicine paper that dismissed a lab origin as implausible. That paper had already shaped the National Intelligence Council's baseline understanding of COVID's origins.
One intelligence official, quoted in the declassified documents, welcomed Fauci's guidance with open arms:
"Given Dr Fauci's background we absolutely would like to follow-up on his outreach suggestions. In this case he's not a policymaker....he's a [subject matter expert] with a wealth of knowledge about current and historical research who probably knows better than most who the real Coronavirus experts are."
The problem, as Gabbard's office framed it, is that Fauci was not a disinterested expert. His institute, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, had funded research at the very lab under investigation. That is not a minor procedural wrinkle. It is a textbook conflict of interest, the subject of the inquiry helping choose the expert witnesses.
Fauci also appeared to steer analysts toward the work of Robert Garry, a Tulane University professor and co-author of the same "Proximal Origin" paper, who had published an analysis in May 2021 arguing the virus had two separate lineages suggesting natural origin. As Fox News reported, the documents suggest Fauci collaborated with intelligence officials to suppress the lab leak theory during this critical review window.
Neither Andersen nor Garry responded to requests for comment.
Ralph Baric, a University of North Carolina virologist who recently retired, occupied a peculiar position in the COVID-origins debate. He had co-authored a 2018 grant proposal, alongside collaborators at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, that involved generating coronaviruses with features found in COVID-19's genome. He was also, it turns out, advising the intelligence community.
Baric served on the Biological Science Expert Group, a panel of advisors to U.S. intelligence on biological weapons. The declassified documents show he advised the IC at least four times in the first two years of the pandemic, including at least three sessions during Biden's 90-day review. His role was so closely held that it only came to light through a typo in a 2024 congressional transcript.
A separate email from someone with a National Intelligence Council email signature recommended that the IC seek Baric's counsel on whether the virus had been engineered. The circularity is hard to miss: a scientist who collaborated with the Wuhan lab on coronavirus research was advising the intelligence community on whether that same lab might have produced the virus.
An email to Baric's former university address bounced back. The Daily Caller News Foundation emailed his wife and scheduler but received no reply.
The declassified files also reveal the fate of a 2021 whistleblower complaint that requested an investigation into Fauci for allegedly lying to Congress. The complaint centered on Fauci's sworn testimony, made under questioning by Sen. Rand Paul, in which he denied that NIAID ever funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab.
The Intelligence Community Inspector General declined to investigate, writing in a declassified document:
"We determined this complaint does not meet the urgent concern standard because the allegedly false statement was made by a non-IC official and it pertains to an activity that the IC [inspector general] has no reason to believe is related to an intelligence activity or has a direct impact on any IC element, personnel, or capability."
The IC IG referred the complaint to the HHS Inspector General, which operated under Biden HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra. Whether the HHS watchdog ever acted on that referral remains unclear. The New York Post reported that Biden-era intelligence officials effectively shielded Fauci from the complaint by routing it to a political appointee rather than an impartial inspector general.
That unanswered question, what happened to the whistleblower referral, may now carry legal weight. Rep. Darrell Issa has called for an official investigation into perjury and cover-up charges against Fauci. As Issa told Breitbart:
"It appears as though he willfully impeded Congress and everyone else in getting to the truth, which probably cost even more lives."
For all their volume, the declassified files leave significant gaps. Notes from a BSEG meeting appear in the documents but remain entirely redacted. The exact dollar amount of taxpayer funding Fauci's institute sent to the Wuhan lab is referenced only as "millions" in Gabbard's public statement, no precise figure appears in the released records.
The raw intelligence about sick Wuhan researchers is referenced in briefing readouts but not included in the declassified package. And the question of why Gabbard's tenure as DNI ended on June 19, 2026, she described it as her "final day", goes unexplained in the documents themselves.
Even so, the bipartisan discomfort with the IC's handling of COVID origins predates this release. Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, a Democrat, had previously said the IC's secrecy about which scientific experts it consulted "made the IC look bad." House Select Subcommittee Chair Brad Wenstrup chastised intelligence community higher-ups for their lack of transparency when briefing Congress on their COVID origins analysis.
The broader pattern of concealment around COVID's origins continues to produce legal consequences. The DOJ's indictment of former Fauci adviser David Morens for allegedly hiding COVID-origins records underscores that the accountability trail extends well beyond Fauci himself.
Meanwhile, Sens. Rand Paul and Ron Johnson have pressed the Trump DOJ to challenge Fauci's Biden-era pardon in court, a legal question the declassified documents may now force into sharper focus.
Gabbard's written statement framed the release in direct terms:
"The COVID-19 pandemic caused tremendous hardship and pain for millions of our fellow Americans and for countless people around the world. After years of lies, censorship, and cover ups, the American people deserve transparency, truth, and accountability."
The documents, as reported by Just the News, show that Fauci and his allies allegedly used what Gabbard characterized as "deep state" tactics to suppress the lab leak theory. Newsmax reported that Fauci met with CIA personnel on June 4, 2021, weeks after his May 11 congressional testimony in which he stated, "The NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain of function research in the Wuhan Institute."
The timeline matters. Fauci denied funding gain-of-function research under oath. Weeks later, he sat with CIA officials. Throughout, he directed the IC toward scientists whose published conclusions aligned with his public position, scientists he had influenced behind the scenes. And when a whistleblower tried to flag the discrepancy, the complaint was shuffled to an office that may never have opened the file.
None of this proves criminal liability on its own. But it establishes something the American public has suspected for years: the man at the center of the pandemic response had every incentive to steer the investigation away from the lab his agency helped fund, and the paper trail now shows he had the access and the influence to do exactly that.
Transparency is not a partisan value. It is the minimum the public deserves from officials who spent their authority and our money, and then asked us to trust them.
