On the last night of former President Joe Biden’s term, he handed Dr. Anthony Fauci a sweeping preemptive pardon.
For what, exactly?
Fauci committed no crime – at least, that was the Biden White House’s official position. He was “The Science,” a career public servant and the face of America’s pandemic response. For years, the media attacked and slandered anyone who questioned Fauci – or the rest of the medical establishment, for that matter.
But now a federal indictment and recent testimony from a CIA analyst are starting to unwind Fauci’s web of lies.
Last month, the Department of Justice (DOJ) indicted Fauci’s top lieutenant, Dr. David Morens, for allegedly destroying and concealing records from investigators looking into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The evidence against him appears devastating. As the pandemic began, hundreds of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests poured into the National Institutes of Health (NIH) seeking information about a 2014 grant overseen by Morens and Fauci that funded research on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
President Donald Trump immediately cut off that funding in April 2020 after an initial review indicated the COVID virus may have come from this laboratory, which was apparently conducting risky gain-of-function research that intentionally makes pathogens more transmissible or deadly.
Notably, Fauci testified to Congress under oath that he never authorized funding for gain-of-function research. But the DOJ indictment evinces that in the early days of the pandemic, Morens intentionally sought to undermine transparency laws to mask the NIH’s involvement with the Wuhan lab.
One email allegedly reads: “There is no need to worry about FOIAs. I can either send stuff to Tony on his private Gmail… or hand it to him at work or at his house.” Morens later wrote, “I learned from our FOIA lady here how to make emails disappear after I am FOIA’ed but before the search starts, so I think we are all safe.”
The indictment names his co-conspirators, the two individuals he sent those emails to, as Dr. Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance non-profit, and Dr. Gerald Keusch, an associate director of Boston University’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories.
Federal watchdogs and congressional investigations discovered that the Wuhan lab received funding for the coronavirus bat research from EcoHealth after the non-profit was awarded a multi-million-dollar grant from NIH, a violation of federal grant policies. The Department of Health and Human Services formally debarred EcoHealth and the board of the non-profit fired Daszak in early 2025.
The DOJ indictment also states that Morens told Daszak and Keusch in a private email exchange in April 2020 that “there are things I can’t say except Tony is aware and I have learned that there are ongoing efforts with NIH to steer this through with minimal damage to you, Peter, and colleagues, and to NIH and NIAID.”
This statement by Morens begins to make sense when considering the recent congressional testimony of 20-year CIA veteran James Erdman.
“Dr. Fauci’s role in the cover-up was intentional,” Erdman said in his opening statement at the Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing on May 14, which had no Democrats in attendance.
Erdman testified under oath that Fauci had deliberately manipulated the intelligence community’s assessment of where COVID came from. Although many analysts presented evidence that the virus could have originated from a lab leak, they were browbeaten and buried by Fauci’s hand-picked scientists who told the CIA that “following the science” indicated a natural origin.
Erdman said that Fauci’s curated roster of scientists had institutional ties to Fauci and aligned professional interests in the natural-origin theory. Some of these same scientists had privately raised concerns about a possible lab leak as early as February 2020. But those same scientists then co-authored the widely cited “Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” paper that publicly dismissed the lab-leak hypothesis as not credible.
Erdman said one author received a $9 million NIH grant not long after changing his public position. Whether that grant was a reward for the change of position or a coincidence is a question that has never been satisfactorily answered.
These revelations matter for two reasons.
First, it now appears likely that Fauci helped fund the lab that may have produced the experimental virus that killed more than a million of his own countrymen.
Second, there now appears to be clear evidence that Fauci abused his authority to cover up his role in funding that lab and dangerous research by publicly dismissing the lab leak theory and pressuring other leading experts to do the same.
No serious institution would tolerate that kind of conflict of interest in any other context. Yet Fauci successfully wielded his influence to coax members of America’s scientific community and federal bureaucracy to cover for him – with zero repercussions.
“These allegations represent a profound abuse of trust at a time when the American people needed it most during the height of a global pandemic,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said after releasing the Morens indictment.
But these most recent revelations might only be the tip of the iceberg in terms of what was happening deep inside America’s health and science institutions during the pandemic.
This is why the Fauci story matters beyond Fauci.
The Erdman testimony and DOJ indictment of Morens signals not just one rogue bureaucrat acting out of line, but rather an entire public health and science leadership deciding – together, methodically – that the American public could not be trusted with an honest accounting of how a deadly pandemic originated.
Fauci himself, at 85 and sheltered behind Biden’s auto-penned pardon, will probably never stand in a courtroom. But accountability does not require a conviction to mean something. Americans who lived through the COVID years — the shutdowns, the mandates, the isolation, the grief — deserve to know the truth. Who can ever forget how the legacy media, Big Tech, and America’s scientific leadership scorned and censored anyone who questioned Fauci’s approved narrative about COVID-19?
“Attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science,” Fauci infamously proclaimed to the media. “All of the things that I have spoken about consistently from the very beginning have been fundamentally based in science.”
Fauci may have been the ringleader, but the failure was institutional, and it does not appear to be the product of honest confusion in the fog of a crisis. Although much of America has since recovered from the COVID pandemic, the reputation of our health and scientific institutions will remain damaged until a full accounting is unearthed and revealed to the country.
Let’s hope Congress and the Trump administration continue the work to uncover the truth.
W.J. Lee has served in the White House, NASA, on multiple campaigns, and in nearly all levels of government.
