Gabbard Drops Fauci Bombshell In Final DNI Move, Accuses Pandemic Figurehead Of Misleading Congress

Outgoing Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard used her final day in office to ignite a major new fight over COVID accountability, releasing documents Thursday night that she said expose Dr. Anthony Fauci’s role in suppressing the lab leak theory and misleading Congress about his contacts with U.S. intelligence agencies.

Gabbard announced the document release in a video posted to X, accusing Fauci of helping steer the official narrative around COVID’s origins while presenting himself to the American public as an independent scientific authority.

She said that Fauci “provided millions in U.S. taxpayer dollars to fund dangerous gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

According to a press release shared by Gabbard’s office, the documents show Fauci worked closely with intelligence officials during the pandemic as public health agencies, the media, and government-aligned experts dismissed questions about whether COVID may have originated from a lab in Wuhan, China.

Gabbard’s office said Fauci was not merely a public health adviser, but a central figure behind the scenes in shaping intelligence assessments about the virus’s origins.

“Fauci was the behind-the-scenes advisor who, with his hand-picked experts, pushed the IC to endorse a natural, animal origin to hide his dangerous research,” she said in the release.

She added, “Fauci became the nation’s pandemic ‘pundit’ and publicly pushed lies, disinformation, and censorship.”

The allegations strike at the heart of a years-long battle over government transparency, free speech, and whether federal officials used public health authority to silence dissenting scientists, reporters, and citizens who questioned the official COVID narrative.

In the press release, Gabbard’s office also accused Fauci of giving testimony to Congress that was contradicted by the newly released correspondence:

The correspondence released today directly contradicts Fauci’s 2024 testimony to the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.

In that hearing, while under oath, Fauci was repeatedly asked whether he spoke to “FBI, CIA, DIA or any U.S. intelligence agency concerning viral research” before, during, or after the pandemic. Fauci repeatedly dodged the questions, before falsely stating, “not to my knowledge about COVID.”

Testimony from multiple whistleblowers reveals intelligence analysts who challenged Fauci’s COVID-origin conclusions faced threat of retaliation, were marginalized, and often suffered career setbacks. This silenced dissent and fostered a culture where truth was sacrificed to conformity and credible evidence was buried.

Gabbard’s office further alleged that Fauci helped create a closed-loop system in which the same small circle of government-backed scientists repeatedly influenced official intelligence findings on COVID’s origins.

Those findings were then used to publicly discredit the lab leak theory, even as Americans who raised legitimate questions were often branded as conspiracy theorists.

The release claimed intelligence officials frequently accepted Fauci’s recommendations and relied on experts who agreed with his preferred conclusion.

For conservatives who warned for years that the pandemic response became a vehicle for censorship, bureaucratic power, and political control, the release adds new fuel to demands for accountability from Washington’s public health establishment.

You can read the trove of documents here.

Former President Joe Biden issued a preemptive pardon to Fauci the day before he left office.