Newly released Senate memos show Anthony Fauci instructed subordinates to delete emails and directed intelligence agencies during the COVID-19 pandemic, fueling criticism over government transparency and accountability.
Federal memos released by Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Rand Paul document at least five separate occasions when Anthony Fauci, former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told recipients to delete emails after reading them. The memos also reveal Fauci’s involvement with the CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), including steering which scientists intelligence officials should consult on the origins of COVID-19. These findings, emerging years after the height of the pandemic, have renewed concerns about honesty and record-keeping at the highest levels of government.
In one damning exchange, Fauci told his deputy Greg Folkers, “please delete this email after you had read it.” On another occasion, he instructed top deputy Cliff Lane, “please delete this email and then delete from the deleted file.” These messages, spanning years from 2009 to 2020, directly contradict long-standing rules requiring federal officials to preserve work-related correspondence.
The Federal Records Act mandates that nearly all federal emails be retained, and a 2016 mandate from then-President Barack Obama required agencies to archive email systems for preservation at the National Archives. An official memo from that time spelled out: “Federal agencies must manage all email records in an electronic format. Email records must be retained in an appropriate electronic system that supports records management and litigation requirements...including the capability to identify, retrieve, and retain the records for as long as they are needed.” Yet, despite these requirements, the released memos provide evidence of Fauci urging the destruction of government records.
These revelations form part of a larger package of documents released by Senator Paul, who chairs the Homeland Security Committee. As a result, the committee voted to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress and referred him to the Department of Justice for prosecution. Paul’s committee cited the repeated instructions to delete emails and Fauci’s refusal to answer questions directly, he reportedly invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination 111 times when appearing under subpoena on July 29.
The memos go beyond record-keeping violations. They reveal that Fauci played an active role in guiding intelligence agencies' understanding of COVID-19’s origins. A CIA memorandum described Fauci urging the agency to contact scientists, Robert Garry, Kristian Andersen, and Eddie Holmes, “all three of whom have advocated for features of the virus that they judge to be consistent with a natural origin.” A July 12, 2021, email from ODNI also stated that Fauci had emphasized a scientific article and identified “the authors whose views he thought were particularly important.”
Both Garry and Holmes, along with Andrew Rambaut (another scientist named in the ODNI correspondence), were on record favoring the theory that COVID-19 originated naturally, not from a laboratory leak. This selection and guidance from Fauci on which experts to consult has drawn scrutiny from lawmakers and has raised questions about whether the intelligence community’s findings were steered to reflect a particular narrative.
The memos also describe an inter-agency contract between the CIA and Fauci’s NIAID to “conduct work to support BTC [biological threat characterization] relevant forensic research needs and focus on comparative genomic analysis of organisms considered agents of bioterrorism.” The contract allowed transfers of funds between the agencies, specifying that these transactions would be unclassified but barred from public release.
Federal law is unambiguous: work-related emails must be preserved. Yet the Senate-released memos contain at least five instances in which Fauci urged deletion. The question is not just one of bureaucratic housekeeping, but of public trust. When officials in charge of the nation’s pandemic response sidestep transparency requirements, it undermines accountability and invites suspicion about what is being concealed.
Fauci’s conduct is not isolated. The case of David Morens, a former senior adviser to Fauci at NIAID, illustrates a pattern. The Department of Justice charged Morens in April with conspiracy and offenses involving federal records and investigations. Morens pleaded guilty this month for his role in a scheme to avoid Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, which included using personal email accounts to discuss National Institutes of Health grants with EcoHealth Alliance, a group that had received federal funding for research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic uncovered evidence in 2024 of Morens’s use of personal email for official business. This followed the Biden administration’s earlier move to issue a broad pardon to Fauci for federal crimes committed between 2014 and 2024, a pardon that covered the period in which many of these email deletions and intelligence contacts took place. The article also reports that some states were considering whether to prosecute Fauci under state law, though it does not specify which states.
Senator Rand Paul’s committee has taken the lead, not only releasing the memos but also voting to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress. The committee’s referral to the Department of Justice raises the stakes, but the outcome of any federal prosecution remains uncertain, especially in light of the pardon issued at the end of the Biden presidency.
The Department of Justice’s ongoing case against Morens demonstrates that the government is willing to take action against those who flout transparency laws. But as the memos show, the culture of evasion appears to have run much deeper, reaching the very top of America’s pandemic response apparatus.
For those demanding accountability, these revelations raise a central question: how can the public trust official narratives about the pandemic if the officials themselves circumvented the rules designed to ensure transparency? A system that allows politically powerful bureaucrats to decide which records the public can see is a system ripe for abuse.
While the document release, as reported by Just the News, provides unprecedented insight into Fauci’s internal communications and intelligence contacts, it leaves gaps. The memos do not specify whether email recipients actually deleted the messages or exactly which federal offenses were covered by Fauci’s pardon. Nor do they clarify the full extent of the coordination between health officials and intelligence agencies.
But the facts that are now public, Fauci’s repeated instructions to destroy correspondence, his role in shaping which experts intelligence agencies consulted, and his refusal to answer questions under oath, paint a troubling picture of how the federal government operated during a crisis that changed the world.
The newly released Senate memos expose a government culture where transparency lost out to self-preservation and narrative control, leaving Americans to wonder just how much more remains hidden behind deleted emails and closed doors.
