National Defense

The Fauci Files: Five Explosive Findings Declassified By Tulsi Gabbard

White House Photo by Molly Riley

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on Thursday evening declassified hundreds of pages related to the coverup of the theory that the COVID-19 virus leaked from an American funded lab in Wuhan, China, and the involvement of the nation’s most powerful public health official, Anthony Fauci, in that coverup.

Gabbard said in a statement that Fauci and his allies in the scientific community and intelligence community ripped a page right out of “the deep state playbook.”

The Daily Caller News Foundation first reported on Fauci’s influence on the intelligence community last year.

Today, on my final day as Director of National Intelligence, I’m releasing never-before-seen communications and documents exposing how Dr. Fauci provided millions in US taxpayer dollars to fund dangerous gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab, worked with politicized elements… pic.twitter.com/ZMdliW4zyS

— DNI Tulsi Gabbard (@DNIGabbard) June 19, 2026

The investigators on Gabbard’s task force sorted through the documents and heard testimony from whistleblowers who reported retaliation for challenging the narrative preferred by Fauci.

“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,” Gabbard said in a statement.

Fauci did not respond to a request for comment.

Here are the five most explosive revelations in the tranche declassified by Gabbard:

Emails Show Fauci’s Extraordinary Influence On The Intelligence Community

Fauci had a conflict of interest as someone whose institute had funded and promoted research to create novel coronaviruses in pursuit of universal vaccines, including at the Wuhan lab, Gabbard said.

But that proved no obstacle when he sought to mold the understanding of the U.S. intelligence community about the deadliest pandemic in a century.

“Given Dr Fauci’s background we absolutely would like to follow-up on his outreach suggestions,” wrote one intelligence official. “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.”

An influential March 2020 scientific paper called “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2” that dismissed a lab origin as implausible and that Fauci influenced behind-the-scenes shaped the understanding of the NIC, the documents show.Fauci’s involvement in the inception of the paper only came to light through documents unearthed from the Freedom of Information Act. Those FOIA documents also showed that the virologists argued publicly for a natural origin and sought the approval of Fauci despite harboring secret concerns about a possible lab origin.

The new documents reveal in new detail that during a 90-day review of the intelligence ordered by President Joe Biden, Fauci repeatedly directed the ODNI to his favored experts, the “Proximal Origin” authors and their colleagues.

In June 2021, Fauci advised that the IC consult Scripps Institute virologist Kristian Andersen, the lead author of “Proximal Origin.”

In May 2021, the National Security Council briefed Fauci on a Presidential Daily Brief titled “Worldwide: Origin of COVID-19 Pandemic Remains Elusive,” the new documents show.

In that briefing, Fauci appears to have steered the IC to the conclusions of a Tulane virologist who had written about the virus having two separate lineages, suggesting a natural origin. Tulane University virologist Robert Garry, another coauthor of the “Proximal Origin” paper, had written just that sort of analysis that month.

Credit: ODNI

Fauci received another intelligence briefing in June, in the midst of a 90-day review of the intelligence ordered by President Joe Biden, the documents show.

Credit: ODNI

When higher-ups in the intelligence community briefed members of Congress on their analysis of the origins of COVID, they refused to specify which scientific experts they had consulted in their analyses. House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic Chair Brad Wenstrup chastised the intelligence community higher-ups for their lack of transparency, while even Democratic Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi said the secrecy made the IC look bad.

Andersen and Garry did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Z Division Report

The Z Division, specialists on foreign weapons generation within the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, assessed by May 2020 that the Wuhan lab had all of the ingredients for a lab accident, including a precursor virus genetically similar enough to COVID.

In order to make this assessment the Z Division read the papers authored by the lab’s scientists but also used “additional intelligence information from a CIA Field Analytic Conversation.”

Many of the virologists who have for years dismissed the lab origin theory as a “conspiracy theory” have argued that the lab did not have a virus genetically similar enough to serve as a progenitor virus. The Z Division report — which relies not only on scientific papers but also on classified intelligence, the Department of Energy’s premier weapons experts — appears to challenge that assumption.

Credit: ODNI

“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 team wrote in their analysis.

Some members of the IC disagreed with the assessment that a precursor virus was present at the WIV, other records show.

Other documents show that higher-ups at the National Intelligence Council and ODNI dismissed the biological weapons experts within the intelligence community, not only within the Z division, but also within the U.S. national laboratories and in other agencies like the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Center for Medical Intelligence.

Credit: ODNI

Ralph Baric Met With U.S. Intel Four Times

Ralph Baric — a virologist who worked on a coronavirus engineering experiments with the WIV — advised the intelligence community at least four times in the first two years of the COVID pandemic, the new documents reveal. One 2018 grant proposal on which Baric and the WIV were collaborators involved the generation of coronaviruses with the same unique features found in the genome of the COVID virus, which some experts have likened to a blueprint for COVID.

Baric serves on the Biological Science Expert Group (BSEG), a group of advisors to the U.S. intelligence on biological weapons, according to his CV. Baric sat for a transcribed interview with congressional investigators in 2024. A typo in the transcript of that interview accidentally revealed the classified information that Baric had in his role as a member of the BSEG advised the intelligence community in the winter of 2020, the DCNF reported last year.

Notes from that BSEG meeting appear in the documents, but are entirely redacted.

Gabbard’s newly declassified documents reveal that the BSEG advised the intelligence community at least three more times during the 90-day review of the intelligence ordered by Biden, suggesting Baric would have had an invitation to repeatedly weigh in on the IC’s assessment despite the conflict of interest.

Credit: ODNI

A separate email shows someone with an email signature from the NIC recommending that the intelligence community seek Baric’s counsel on the question of whether the virus had been engineered.

An email to Baric’s former email at the University of North Carolina, the institution from which Baric recently retired, bounced back. DCNF emailed his wife and scheduler for comment, but did not receive a reply.

Sick Wuhan Researchers

Several readouts of classified briefings refer to intelligence about researchers in Wuhan who fell ill in in the fall of 2019.

While the declassified documents do not include summaries or any raw intelligence about these researchers, the allusions to the researchers appear to at least in part confirm news reports that virologists in Wuhan working on coronaviruses in the fall of 2019 became sick with a respiratory virus.

Whistleblower Report On Fauci’s Testimony

A whistleblower requested an investigation in 2021 by the intelligence community’s internal watchdog into Fauci for lying to Congress under questioning by Paul about the ties between his institute and research at the Wuhan lab.

Fauci had falsely claimed under oath that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases had never funded research at the Wuhan lab that met the definition of “gain-of-function”  — research that makes viruses more infectious or deadly.

Despite Fauci’s influence on the IC at the country’s top biodefense official, the IC passed the buck to the inspector general at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), documents show.

“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,” an intelligence official wrote.

It’s not clear that the health department’s watchdog, then under Biden HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, ever acted on that referral.