‘Caught red-handed’: Rand Paul Files Criminal Referral Against Fauci for Allegedly Lying to Congress Over Gain-of-Function Research

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) announced Saturday that he has sent an official criminal referral against Dr. Anthony Fauci to the Department of Justice after newly surfaced emails from 2020 appear to contradict Dr. Fauci’s claim in a 2021 Congressional hearing that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) never funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China.

[RELATED: House Oversight Report: Top Scientists Suppressed COVID Lab Leak Hypothesis to Protect China]

In a July 2021 Congressional hearing, Sen. Paul asked Fauci if he wished to retract his earlier claim that the NIH had never funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a Chinese state-run lab.

During the exchange, Paul, who graduated from the Duke University School of Medicine, cited a journal article entitled “Discovery of a rich gene pool of bat SARS-related coronaviruses,” which was in part funded by an NIH grant.

The author of the journal paper combined two bat coronavirus spike genes to create new viruses that are not found in nature, which were shown to replicate in humans, Paul explained during the hearing.

“Viruses that in nature only infect animals were manipulated in the Wuhan lab to gain the function of infecting humans,” Paul said.

PAUL: Knowing that it is a crime to lie to Congress, do you wish to retract your statement of May 11th where you claimed that the NIH never funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan?

FAUCI: Senator Paul, I have never lied before the Congress, and I do not retract that statement…[…]…You do not know what you’re talking about.

Congressional hearing, July 20, 2021

In a post to X — formerly known as Twitter — Saturday, Paul pointed to a February 2020 email in which Fauci detailed a call with British medical researcher Jeremy Farrar.

In the email, Fauci addressed concerns from the COVID task force that certain mutations in the virus appeared to be unnatural and “intentionally inserted.”

“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,” Fauci wrote in the 2020 email.

Paul joined Fox & Friends Monday to discuss why he believes Fauci lied to Congress in 2021 — which is a felony — about the NIH’s involvement in coronavirus gain-of-function research in Wuhan.

“There’s probably never been a government official caught more red-handed in a lie than this because now he proved the lie in his own words,” Paul said Monday on Fox.

“So at first he kind of acted like ‘oh, we don’t have anything to do with the research over there. We don’t fund the research in Wuhan.’ So we found the actual scientific papers, we found the grant number proving that it came from his agency. And then he said, ‘oh, well, yeah, we’re funding it, but it’s not gain-of-function. My experts up and down have looked at this and it’s not gain-of-function.’,” Paul said.

Paul then cites the February 2020 email, in which Fauci admits in private that there are suspicions over the origin of the virus and that the Wuhan lab was conducting gain-of-function research.

“But now we have, in his own words, admitting that it was gain-of-function, admitting they funded it and admitting that it gave them suspicion to the possibility that this pandemic actually came from the lab,” he said. “So now we have him dead to rights.”

The Republican Senator went on to say that he does not think that Fauci will ever be prosecuted by the Justice Department because Attorney General Merrick Garland is, in Paul’s words, a “pure, rank partisan.”