Gabbard: Fauci’s COVID Actions “Straight from the Deep-State Playbook”

by Sharon Rondeau

(Jun. 19, 2026) — On Thursday, departing Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard posted a video, press release and documents relating to former NIAID Director Dr. Anthony S. Fauci’s role in the United States’ handling of the COVID-19 virus originating in Wuhan, China in late 2019.

On her last day of service and in the interest of what she said was “President Trump’s maximum transparency mandate,” Gabbard described the revelations as “never-before-seen communications and documents that expose exactly how Fauci worked with politicized career leadership in the intelligence community to suppress the truth about his actions, the virus’s lab-leak origins, and his role in directing U.S. funding for this dangerous research that caused immeasurable harm and countless lost lives.”

Initially Fauci insisted the virus emanated from a Wuhan market, where he said it migrated to humans, a view he continued to express as late as 2023. Dissenters increasingly believed, however, that the virus was leaked — accidentally or purposely — from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which had been experimenting with combining bat viruses with the SARS virus.

“In April 2020, the Trump administration terminated an NIH grant to research how coronaviruses spread from bats to humans,^[34][35]” Wikipedia reports in an article detailing the work of the WIV. “New York-based, NIH–funded EcoHealth Alliance has been the subject of controversy and increased scrutiny due to its ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.^[36][37][38] Under political pressure, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) withdrew funding to EcoHealth Alliance in July 2020.^[39]“

On January 18, 2025, New York Post reported:

The Department of Health and Human Services on Friday barred EcoHealth Alliance and the group’s former president, Peter Daszak, from receiving federal funding for five years after they failed to report potentially dangerous gain-of-function research experiments to the government.

…The House Oversight Committee’s Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic had been investigating the novel bat virus research that EcoHealth Alliance and Daszak conducted out of China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology leading up to the COVID-19 outbreak.

The panel uncovered evidence last year indicating that EcoHealth Alliance and Daszak “willingly” and “repeatedly” violated multiple requirements of a multimillion-dollar National Institutes of Health grant for the controversial project.

As late as February 2025, some sources continued to report that “zoonotic spillover” was the “correct” COVID-19 origination theory, although considerably prior to that, then-FBI Director Christopher Wray said, “The FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident.”

On May 11, 2021, Fauci testified to the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee during which he told Sen. Roger Marshall, a medical doctor, he would be open to “an investigation” of the Wuhan lab to determine the virus’s origin. “…we [the NIH] don’t fund research,” Fauci told Marshall at the time. “We have committees that look at that to make sure that research that is of any potential danger is not funded.”

The following month, House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Chairman James Comer (R-KY1) wrote on X relating to an interview with Newsmax:

EcoHealth Alliance used American tax dollars to conduct Gain-of-Function research in Wuhan. And it appears Fauci & the NIH knew about it. Where’s the accountability from the Biden Administration? @newsmax

The full committee remarked, in response to a letter it received from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), NIAID’s parent agency:

July 28th NIH says “no NIAID funding was approved for Gain of Function research at the WIV.”

Obviously, they were lied to.

NIH confirmed today EcoHealth and the WIV conducted GOF research on bat coronaviruses.

@PeterDaszak with EcoHealth hid it from the USG.

On May 19, 2022, Factcheck.org, which vehemently denied reports the Obama “short-form” and “long-form” birth certificates were of questionable origin, wrote of White House Trade Advisor Peter Navarro, who is currently senior counselor for trade and manufacturing:

The U.S. indirectly funded some bat coronavirus research at a lab in Wuhan, China. But those experiments could not have led to the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, because the viruses used were very different. Yet former White House trade adviser Peter Navarro repeated a false claim that Dr. Anthony Fauci “killed a lot of people” by funding the lab.

It’s not known how SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, originated. But many scientists suspect the virus “spilled over” into humans from an animal. There is no evidence the virus was created in a lab, let alone as part of any U.S.-funded research.

For over a year, politicians and others have misleadingly cited certain grants awarded to a group collaborating with a lab in Wuhan to incorrectly suggest that National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci is responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic.

While there is a debate about whether some of the research should have been funded or performed, the experiments did not produce SARS-CoV-2, as the National Institutes of Health and others have explained.

The latest iteration of these claims comes from Peter Navarro, former President Donald Trump’s trade adviser, who in a May 16 interview with the conservative outlet Newsmax blamed Fauci for the pandemic and called for his imprisonment.

Navarro began by responding to a clip of Fauci telling CNN on May 15 that he would not serve under Trump if the former president were elected in 2024.

“Tony, you’re fired, dude. There’s no way you’re ever getting back into the Trump White House,” Navarro said, adding that as soon as Republicans take back the House, Fauci would sit in Congress and “confess to creating the virus that’s killed almost a million Americans now.”

“We’re going to fit you for an orange jumpsuit, Tony, you can count on that,” he continued. “So don’t be smug on CNN, dude, okay. You’re fired. And if that’s the only thing that happens to you, Tony, you’ll be lucky because you killed a lot of people by funding this Wuhan lab. You got in bed with the Chinese Communist Party, you lied to the American people.”

Fauci, who has been head of NIAID since 1984 and is one of the most distinguished living scientists, has served under seven presidents, including three Democrats and four Republicans. At age 81, Fauci has said he is thinking of retirement, but has no immediate plans to depart and would not do so until the country is firmly out of danger from COVID-19’s pandemic phase.

Later, Navarro, who has previously misled the public about hydroxychloroquine as a COVID-19 treatment and shared inaccurate information about COVID-19 vaccines, baselessly stated as fact that the pandemic began at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

“This is where the virus started,” he said, pointing to an image of the facility. “This was funded by Tony Fauci. Gain-of-function research is what he went behind the back of Donald Trump and the White House to get going here in 2017 with the Chinese communists. And now we have a pandemic that’s killed almost a million people. I don’t know how this guy is still in public office, he really ought to have a jumpsuit.”

Newsmax shared its interview with Navarro on Facebook, where it received more than 30,000 views in two days.

On June 3, 2024, Fauci was the sole witness to testify to the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic after sitting for a transcribed interview with the same group five months earlier.

In his January interview, Fauci departed from his earlier insistence that the virus arose through natural means, as Reason reported at the time:

In recent months, Fauci has denied he ever categorically rejected the possibility that COVID-19 accidentally escaped from a laboratory. But he faces very serious allegations that he deterred scientific experts from considering it. At issue is “The Proximal Origin of Sars-CoV-2,” a paper that appeared in Nature Medicine, a scientific journal, in March 2020 at the very start of the global pandemic. Fauci—who was then head of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)—and Francis Collins—then director of the National Institutes of Health—participated in a conference call with the authors, whose initial openness to a lab leak explanation changed significantly prior to publication. The paper ultimately ruled out a lab leak as not just “unlikely”—the phrasing used in an early draft of the paper—but “improbable.”

More recently, Fauci has contended that he always remained open to the idea, but was persuaded by scientific arguments—including those in the proximal origin paper—that a zoonotic spillover was more likely. This claim would be more persuasive if Fauci had not stated over and over and over and over again, in media interviews, that he “strongly favored” the zoonotic origin theory; his subsequent suggestion that he did not lean in either direction is flatly contradicted by his literal words.

It was certainly in Fauci’s interest to downplay the possibility that human experimentation on viruses accidentally unleashed COVID-19 upon the world; during his career, Fauci remained one of the foremost advocates of public funding for gain-of-function research, in which scientists manipulate viruses in order to make them deadlier and more transmissible. Fauci and other public health experts have straightforwardly denied that the U.S. funded such research in Wuhan, China, but critics say this is an exercise in semantics. Indeed, EcoHealth Alliance—a U.S. nonprofit that obtained public funding to conduct research on bat coronaviruses in Wuhan, China—was caught actively misleading Pentagon officials about the nature of the experimentation: Peter Daszak, the head of EcoHealth Alliance, advised colleagues to deceive regulators about the fact that the research would be conducted in China under laxer lab safety standards.

In his opening statement, Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-OH2), a former podiatric surgeon who retired from Congress in 2025 said, in part:

At a time when you were prompting the ‘‘Proximal Origin’’ paper, whose focus was to, quote, ‘‘disprove the lab leak theory,’’ end quote, I was in lockdown, researching with another physician in Ohio to try and understand the pathology, the affected physiology,
and what treatments worked, and even how to diagnose COVID before we had specific COVID tests. My friend even made a phone call to an infectious disease doctor in China, looking for help.

As well during that time, we discovered the Baric-Shi 2015 article on creating a chimera using gain-of-function-type technology.

While policy decisions should’ve been based on scientific data, some, frankly, were not. The burdensome six-foot social distancing rule did not have sufficient scientific report. In your words, it just sort of appeared. Distancing made sense, but the six feet was arbitrary. Even Dr. Collins said he still hasn’t seen any empirical evidence to support the six-foot rule—a rule that shut down schools and businesses, a rule that will have negative ramifications for decades.

As the pandemic wore on, more mandates also just sort of appeared, but the American public didn’t get to see the scientific data to support these mandates.

Americans were aggressively bullied, shamed, and silenced for merely questioning or debating issues such as social distancing, masks, vaccines, or the origins of COVID.

Many Americans were willing to comply with the 15 days to slow the spread and understood the necessity of banning travel from certain countries in an attempt to slow down the virus, but many Americans became very frustrated when components of those 15 days stretched into years.

And it should not have been the case that Americans were forced to comply with oppressive mandates when those who chose to illegally cross our southern border were not, or when Governor Newsom, or Governor Whitmer, were throwing parties at nice restaurants. Not a good look. Americans do not hate science, but Americans know hypocrisy when they see it.

Dr. Fauci, under your leadership, the United States health agencies adopted specific policy aims as a single dogmatic truth, without the benefit of debate, out of a desire for a single narrative.

Dr. Fauci, you once said, ‘‘If you disagree with me, you disagree with science.’’ Science doesn’t belong to any one person. I was never taught that science turns a blind eye to hypotheses. They serve to be proven or disproven, and done so with irrefutable facts, if able.

It was interesting that you chose not to pursue an aggressive and transparent scientific investigation of both natural spillover and lab leak. We have been investigating both hypotheses.

You testified before the Select Subcommittee in your transcribed interview that the lab leak theory was not a conspiracy theory. You embraced the ‘‘Proximal Origin’’ letter—it wasn’t necessarily a full peer-reviewed research paper—but you embraced ‘‘Proximal Origin’’ letter, and you shared it with the public from the White House lawn.

In the video Gabbard said the documentation she released proves Fauci “manipulated” intelligence assessments on COVID-19″ and “lied to Congress in 2024 when under oath, he denied knowledge of or participation in discussions with intelligence officials about viral research.”

Whistleblowers who reported their observations of Fauci’s conduct to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), Gabbard said, often became targets of retaliation.

According to 18 U.S. Code § 1001:

(a) Except as otherwise provided in this section, whoever, in any matter within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative, or judicial branch of the Government of the United States, knowingly and willfully—

(1) falsifies, conceals, or covers up by any trick, scheme, or device a material fact;

(2) makes any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation; or

(3) makes or uses any false writing or document knowing the same to contain any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or entry;

shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 5 years or, if the offense involves international or domestic terrorism (as defined in section 2331), imprisoned not more than 8 years, or both. If the matter relates to an offense under chapter 109A, 109B, 110, or 117, or section 1591, then the term of imprisonment imposed under this section shall be not more than 8 years.

Legalclarity.org reports:

Lying to Congress is a federal crime that carries up to five years in prison and a fine under several different statutes. The specific charge depends on how the dishonesty occurs — whether someone lies under oath, submits a false written statement, tampers with evidence, or refuses to comply with a subpoena. Each offense has distinct elements prosecutors must prove, and the differences between them matter more than most people realize.

and:

Why Recanting Doesn’t Help Before Congress

Federal law does allow a recantation defense for false statements made in court or grand jury proceedings — if a witness corrects a lie before it substantially affects the proceeding and before the falsehood has been exposed, prosecution under 18 U.S.C. § 1623 is barred.⁴ But that statute specifically covers courts and grand juries. It does not extend to congressional proceedings. Someone who lies during a committee hearing and then tries to walk it back has no statutory recantation defense — the original false testimony can still be prosecuted under § 1621 or § 1001.

“The tactics that were used to hide the truth are straight from the Deep-State playbook,” Gabbard said at 4:52 in the video. “Politicized, self-serving leaders like Dr. Fauci covered up their own wrongdoing and abuses of power, manipulated intelligence, lied to Congress, and undermined a duly-elected president by restricting his access to the vital facts he needed to keep the country safe.”

She concluded the video with, “It’s time you know the truth.”