Sen. Paul Refers Fauci to DOJ for Allegedly Lying Under Oath

Dr. Anthony Fauci testifies in front of the U.S. Senate on Sept. 14. The director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who became the face of the government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, announces on Aug. 22 that he plans to retire at the end of the year. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) referred Dr. Anthony Fauci to the Department of Justice this week for allegedly lying under oath about his knowledge of gain-of-function lab research conducted in Wuhan, China.

During a congressional hearing in May 2021, Dr. Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), testified that “the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” An email later revealed this was not true.

“Dr. Fauci’s testimony is inconsistent with facts that have since come to light,” wrote Dr. Paul in a letter, first obtained by the Daily Mail, to U.S. Attorney Matthew Graves.

Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) speaks during a hearing with the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions committee on Capitol Hill in Washington on Feb. 3, 2021. (Anna Moneymaker/Pool/Getty Images)

In a separate hearing, Dr. Paul, who was a practicing medical doctor as well, had warned Dr. Fauci that such false statements constituted a criminal act and offered him the opportunity to recant and amend his previous statements. Dr. Fauci said he had “never lied before the Congress” and “[I] do not retract that statement.”

“His own colleagues have acknowledged Dr. Fauci’s inconsistency,” Dr. Paul wrote, referring to select emails released by the U.S. House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. “A congressional hearing, however, is not the place for a public servant to play political games—especially when the health and well-being of American citizens is on the line.”

The Epoch Times reached out to the DOJ to ask whether they will be proceeding with the investigation Dr. Paul requested.

Dr. Paul sent the referral to Mr. Graves after a previous referral to Attorney General Merrick Garland did not trigger action.

Gain-of-Function Emails

On Feb. 1, 2020, Dr. Fauci sent an email to colleagues at Health and Human Services after he and Dr. Francis Collins participated in a task force conference call with a number of other scientists.

“They were concerned about the fact that upon viewing the sequences of several isolates of the nCoV, there were mutations in the virus that would be most unusual to have evolved naturally in the bats and that there was a suspicion that this mutation was intentionally inserted,” he wrote.

“The suspicion was heightened by the fact that scientists in Wuhan University are known to have been working on gain-of-function experiments to determine the molecular mechanisms associated with bat viruses adapting to human infection, and the outbreak originated in Wuhan.”

Furthermore, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has stated that it funded research that falls under the gain-of-function category. The lab in Wuhan, which received NIH grants, genetically manipulated bat coronavirus strains, which resulted in sicker mice than those exposed to the unmodified virus.

The House subcommittee’s investigation had also revealed that Dr. Fauci was not only aware of such research, but tried to deflect attention from it more than once. Other emails showed he “prompted” the publication of a paper meant to “disprove” a lab-leak theory in regards to the origins of COVID-19.

Three days after the February call, four scientists who were on the call submitted that paper, titled “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” for Drs. Fauci and Collins to review, edit, and approve.

They disapproved based on the fact that the paper “did not squash the lab leak hypothesis,” according to the House subcommittee’s memo. In the end, the paper suggests that the virus may have originated in Malaysia pangolins, despite earlier emails in which one of the authors “did not find the pangolin data compelling.”

Testimony

In a hearing after the emails’ release, Dr. Paul confronted Dr. Fauci about his earlier statements.

“Dr. Fauci, as you are aware, it is a crime to lie to Congress,” he said, entering into the record details about the Wuhan experiment. “These experiments combine genetic information from different coronaviruses that affect animals, but not humans, to create novel, artificial viruses able to infect human cells.”

As a gain-of-function experiment receiving NIH grant funding, it should have been subject to a pause issued from 2014 to 2017 by the NIH, Dr. Paul added, but it wasn’t. “It never came under any scrutiny.”

Dr. Fauci said the research he referred to was “judged by qualified staff up and down the chain as not being gain-of-function.”

“You do not know what you are talking about, quite frankly, and I want to say that officially. You do not know what you are talking about.”

Both Dr. Fauci and Dr. Paul acknowledged that the viruses used in the experiment were not SARS-CoV-2.

A point of contention arose in that NIH and HHS have different definitions of gain-of-function.

In 2022, Dr. Fauci continued to defend the testimonies from 2021.

“I’d be more than happy to discuss anything that we’ve done over the last several years with this outbreak, since I have nothing to hide and I can defend everything we’ve done,” he said.

Dr. Paul referred to a criminal statute in his letter, in which any person making false, fictitious, or fraudulent statements of representations was subject to criminal fines and imprisonment up to five years.