Autopen pardons aside, the nation deserves answers on the Fauci files

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On June 19, Tulsi Gabbard, the decorated Army combat veteran and former Democratic presidential candidate, used her final day as Director of National Intelligence to drop a grenade.

Gabbard declassified hundreds of pages of communications and documents that suggest Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, allegedly manipulated the intelligence community to misinform the public about COVID-19 and its origins.

The documents appear to bolster longstanding claims that Fauci had funded dangerous viral gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. As COVID began to spread, he worked with politicized factions within the U.S. intelligence community to suppress evidence that the pandemic was the result of a lab leak. He allegedly lied about this under oath before Congress in 2024.

In announcing the release, Gabbard referred to it as “years of lies, censorship, and cover-ups.” If she is right, then this isn’t a political controversy — it’s a crime scene.

The documents reveal that, during a 90-day presidential review of COVID origins ordered by President Joe Biden in 2021, Fauci repeatedly steered intelligence analysts toward his preferred experts, including co-authors of the “Proximal Origin” paper arguing for a natural-animal origin. Internal emails show an official writing that “Dr. Fauci recommended that the [intelligence community] reach out to the below individuals” — the ones who co-authored that same paper.

So the man whose institute had funded the research under investigation was also helping choose who would review it. That does not sound like peer review — it sounds more like a cover-up.

Intelligence analysts saw it. Senior analysts flagged a deep institutional conflict of interest and called Fauci a “highly interested policymaker” rather than a neutral expert. They rejected him as an outside reviewer for the final evaluation.

Meanwhile, the Z Division biological weapons experts at Lawrence Livermore, who identified a genetically similar precursor virus at Wuhan, supporting a lab-leak finding, were overruled by National Intelligence Council leadership.

Those who tried to blow the whistle reported retaliation. A contractor claims to have been terminated days after coming forward. Analysts say they were reminded that promotions would track with their reaching the preferred conclusion.

Of course, the intelligence community’s credibility problem is not new but part of a longstanding a pattern. This is the same intelligence community ecosystem whose alumni had just recently interfered with an election, coordinating with the Biden campaign to falsely label Hunter Biden’s laptop as “Russian disinformation.”

The Fauci household net worth roughly doubled during the pandemic, rising from $7.6 million in 2019 to $12.6 million by end of 2021, according to OpenTheBooks financial disclosures. His agency sat inside a pipeline of $710 million in royalty payments from pharmaceutical companies flowing into the NIH during the pandemic, including a $400 million catch-up royalty payment from Moderna alone in 2022. How much went to which scientists? The NIH has declined to say.

The new documents released by Gabbard frame Fauci’s research agenda as “linked to big pharma and the pursuit of universal vaccines worth trillions of dollars.” If a regulator is profiting from a crisis, controlling the narrative about it, and shaping the intelligence assessment designed to explain it, the word for that is not “coincidence.” It is “regulatory capture.”

On Jan. 19, 2025, Biden issued a preemptive, full and unconditional pardon for Fauci, signed by autopen at 10:31 p.m. the night before Inauguration Day. Biden was not in the room when it was signed — authorization traveled through a chain of emails from chief of staff Jeff Zients. The House Oversight Committee’s 93-page report deemed the autopen pardons void — lacking “written approval traceable to the president’s own consent.” Former Attorney General Pam Bondi initiated a review.

USC’s Schaeffer Center estimates COVID’s total economic cost at $14 trillion through 2023. More than 1.1 million Americans died. The World Bank, UNESCO, and UNICEF estimated that pandemic school closures could additionally cost today’s students up to $17 trillion in lifetime earnings.

Churches were shuttered by government order. Businesses new and old were destroyed by decree. Citizens were forced to mask and confined by governors who were at the same time dining unmasked at fancy indoor restaurants.

If any of that rested on suppression of truth about the virus’s origin, the public is owed an accounting — starting with the First Amendment violations that a federal court found in Missouri v. Biden, when it concluded the government had coerced social media platforms to suppress protected speech. The Fifth Circuit later affirmed that ruling in relevant part, before the Supreme Court vacated in 2024 for lack of standing.

Fair-minded observers will note that Gabbard’s release is not a verdict. Fauci denies wrongdoing. Intelligence documents carry ambiguity. The autopen question remains genuinely unsettled law.

Those cautions are real. But at this point, the FBI, the Department of Energy, and the CIA have all placed varying degrees of confidence behind a lab-leak conclusion. Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-Ky.) years of pointed questioning — met with visible contempt at every hearing — now look more prescient than paranoid.

A pardon was issued before any charges were filed, which tends to raise red flags for reasonable minds. As Gordon Gekko noted in a different context, the most valuable commodity is information. The American people are still owed a great deal of it.

Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management.

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Anthony Fauci

Hunter Biden

Jeff Zients

Joe Biden

Pam Bondi

Tulsi Gabbard

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