Anthony Fauci bristled when CIA officers told him the Wuhan Institute of Virology had been running undisclosed coronavirus experiments on pangolin samples, then called the briefers "amateurs" and the session "catastrophic," his own private diary now shows.
The June 4, 2021 diary entry, part of a 1,141-page trove released by the Daily Caller News Foundation, describes a combative Fauci who treated the CIA's signals intelligence on the Wuhan lab not as a lead worth pursuing but as an insult to his authority. Sen. Rand Paul, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, published the diary on July 25.
The intelligence was specific. CIA officers told Fauci the Wuhan Institute of Virology had collected pangolin coronaviruses in the field, received additional pangolin virus samples from a research group in Beijing, and experimented on those viruses in genetically modified mice, so-called transgenic mice engineered to mimic human biology. Some of that work, the CIA told Fauci, had been conducted alongside the Chinese military.
Fauci's reaction, in his own words, was not curiosity. It was suspicion, directed at the briefers, not the lab.
In the June 4 entry, Fauci wrote that the tone of the briefing rattled him enough to joke about legal representation. As he recorded in the diary:
"In the matter [sic] in which she [one of the CIA briefers] was asking me questions almost made me believe she was grilling me prompting me to say somewhat tongue in cheek whether I should have a lawyer with me."
He also wrote that the session reminded him of past failures by the agency:
"It was very similar to some of the very disappointing briefings that I had previously received in prior years from the CIA."
Fauci described the briefing as "naive" and "extremely strange." He labeled the CIA officials "amateurs." And he called the entire session "catastrophic", a word that, in context, he aimed at the intelligence officers rather than at the undisclosed Chinese military-linked experiments they had just described.
Three days later, on June 7, 2021, Fauci met with Beth Cameron, the senior director for intelligence programs at the National Security Council. Cameron gave Fauci a personal briefing that detailed what the NSC had already presented to the president a week earlier. Fauci's response, per the diary, was to urge the NSC to consult with virologists in his own inner circle, the same small group he had privately worked with on public messaging about COVID origins since February 2020.
That same day, June 7, 2021, Scripps Institute virologist Kristian Andersen, one of the scientists in Fauci's orbit, wrote a Slack message after learning about the WIV's pangolin work "through the grapevine":
"Do we know about WIV working in pangolin CoVs [coronaviruses] in the lab? If so, that's huge."
Andersen had separately alerted Fauci in June 2021 that the virus looked inconsistent with natural evolution, according to documents Paul released alongside the diary. Yet Andersen went on to become one of the world's most prominent advocates for the theory that COVID-19 jumped to humans naturally at a Wuhan wet market. He did not respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The disconnect between what Andersen called "huge" in private and what he promoted in public mirrors the broader pattern the diary reveals: officials who had access to troubling intelligence about the Wuhan lab chose, again and again, to steer the public conversation away from it.
The pangolin angle matters because of what it rules out. In early 2020, South China Agricultural University announced it had isolated a pangolin coronavirus from Guangdong Province that was 99% similar to the new coronavirus. Virologists initially hypothesized pangolins might have been the animal bridge that carried the virus to humans at the Wuhan wet market.
But the full data undercut that theory fast. One pangolin gene was 99% identical to COVID-19, yet another key gene was only 85% similar, and it lacked the pandemic virus's most distinctive feature: a furin cleavage site mutation, a genetic signature that makes the virus far more efficient at infecting human cells.
Alina Chan, author of "VIRAL: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19," told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the CIA's intelligence reframes the pangolin question entirely:
"The main thing is, the path for a pangolin virus to emerge in Wuhan is clearer now and it's through the WIV. The [wet] market didn't sell any live pangolins, as a [study conducted before the pandemic showed]."
If the market never sold live pangolins, the only known pathway for pangolin coronaviruses to reach Wuhan ran through the lab, the same lab the CIA told Fauci was experimenting on those viruses in transgenic mice.
The pangolin revelation lands harder in light of a separate diary entry. Fauci wrote on January 26, 2020: "Now we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier." That was more than a year before the CIA briefing, and more than four years before Fauci continued publicly defending the wet market theory, including in congressional testimony and in his memoir.
Ken Cuccinelli, who served on the original White House Coronavirus Task Force, reacted sharply to the revelation. "I was one of the seven original members of the Coronavirus task force and he never said this to us," Cuccinelli said, "even as the source was a subject of intense interest."
Fauci's private writings have repeatedly contradicted what he told Congress and the public. His diary entries from April 2020, also released by Paul, show him writing that "No one is really in charge or even knows what they are doing" and "There really is no plan and no one is really in charge", assessments he never shared publicly while positioning himself as the face of a confident federal response.
The CIA briefing and the NSC meeting came during a critical stretch. In August 2021, a Marine Corps officer working with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon's advanced-research arm, blew the whistle about a research proposal involving the Wuhan lab and cleavage sites resembling the distinctive one found in the COVID virus. That disclosure, documented in Senate Homeland Security Committee records, added another data point linking the pandemic to lab-based research rather than natural spillover.
One of Fauci's own inner-circle virologists had flagged concerns months before the CIA briefing about a pangolin virus escaping from a research group in southern China. Yet when the CIA independently surfaced intelligence confirming the WIV was working with pangolin coronaviruses, Fauci's instinct was not to follow the thread. It was to dismiss the messengers and redirect the conversation to scientists he trusted, scientists who, like Andersen, would go on to champion the natural-origin theory in public.
Earlier diary entries released by Paul on Monday shed light on the institutional roots of Fauci's defensiveness. The biodefense buildup that gave Fauci enormous influence over gain-of-function research began after the 2001 anthrax scare, initiated by Vice President Dick Cheney and led by Fauci himself. The diary entries show Fauci's disapproval of scientists and journalists who opposed gain-of-function research on biosecurity grounds, the very kind of research the CIA was now telling him the Wuhan lab had been conducting in secret.
Within days of CIA Director John Ratcliffe taking the helm in 2025, the agency assessed that the pandemic was likely the result of a lab leak. Former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard pushed to declassify the underlying COVID-origins intelligence, but the CIA resisted, according to CIA whistleblower Jim Erdman. A 2023 law requiring disclosure of that intelligence has not been fully enforced; key material remains classified.
The Daily Caller News Foundation first reported last year that the U.S. had collected signals intelligence from Chinese Communist Party leaders in 2019, intercepting communications sent between Beijing and Wuhan at the height of the pandemic's earliest days. The full content of those intercepts has never been made public.
Declassified documents released by Gabbard allege that Fauci served as a behind-the-scenes advisor to the intelligence community while simultaneously guiding policy decisions, creating what critics describe as a circular reporting system in which the same small group of scientists shaped both the intelligence assessments and the public narrative. Whistleblower testimony included in those documents claims that intelligence analysts who supported the lab-leak hypothesis faced career consequences. "Managers reminded analysts who advocated for the lab-leak hypothesis that leadership would determine which analysts would be promoted," one Gabbard press release stated.
Fauci appeared before Paul's Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee on Wednesday and immediately invoked the Fifth Amendment. Given what the diary now shows, that Fauci privately dismissed the wet market theory, received specific intelligence about undisclosed Chinese military-linked experiments, disparaged the briefers who delivered it, and steered the NSC toward his own handpicked advisors, his decision to refuse testimony under oath takes on a different weight.
NIH ethics officials, meanwhile, had approved Fauci accepting the Dan David Prize worth nearly $900,000 during his tenure at NIAID, while blocking other awards from universities that received NIAID funding, a detail from the broader diary release that raises its own questions about the financial incentives surrounding the man who shaped America's pandemic response.
The CIA did not respond to a request for comment. Andersen did not respond either. Fauci, behind the Fifth Amendment, has said nothing at all.
When the intelligence community hands you evidence of secret military-linked virus experiments at the lab down the road from the outbreak, and your first move is to call the briefers amateurs and circle the wagons, the public deserves to know. Now, five years late, they do.
