Tulsi Gabbard spent her last day as Director of National Intelligence doing what she had promised to do from the start: pulling back the curtain on the federal government's handling of COVID-19's origins. The outgoing DNI released a trove of newly declassified documents that her office says expose Dr. Anthony Fauci's direct role in shaping, and, the office alleges, manipulating, the intelligence community's assessment of how the pandemic began.
The document release, which Fox News reported came Thursday night, landed alongside a pointed ODNI press release accusing Fauci of working "with politicized career leadership in the Intelligence Community to suppress the truth about his actions, the virus' lab-leak origins, and his role in directing U.S. funding for this dangerous research that caused immeasurable harm and countless lost lives." The press release further alleges that "Fauci lied to Congress in 2024, when under oath he denied knowledge of or participation in discussions with intelligence officials about viral research."
Those are not small claims. They are official assertions from the nation's top intelligence office, now part of the public record.
The internal emails and records paint a picture of Fauci's involvement in the intelligence community's 90-day COVID-19 origins study ordered by the president. One email from an unnamed intelligence official leading the study stated plainly that Fauci had recommended specific scientists for the IC to interview:
"For those who don't know me, I'm the [REDACTED] and, as such, leading the [intelligence community's] 90-day POTUS COVID origin study. Per below, Dr Fauci recommended that the IC reach out to the below individuals who were coauthors of the attached paper as part of the study."
A second official responded by defending the decision to follow Fauci's lead, writing that "given Dr Fauci's background we absolutely would like to follow-up on his outreach suggestions. In this case he's not a policymaker....he's a SME with a wealth of knowledge about current and historical research who probably knows better than most who the real Coronavirus experts are."
That framing, Fauci as a neutral subject-matter expert rather than a policymaker with skin in the game, is precisely the kind of institutional reasoning that allowed one man to shape the government's understanding of the pandemic's origins while simultaneously being a central figure in the research funding that may have contributed to it.
The documents also reveal that intelligence officials considered bringing Fauci on as an outside reviewer of their COVID-19 origins assessment but ultimately rejected the idea, warning he would be seen as having a conflict of interest. That they recognized the conflict but still took his recommendations on whom to interview raises its own set of questions.
Supporting documents reported by Newsmax add another layer. Fauci reportedly met with CIA personnel on June 4, 2021, nearly a month after he told a Senate hearing that the National Institutes of Health had not funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. During that private meeting, Fauci was described as "particularly interested" in the Wuhan lab's work on pangolins and asked for specifics, while giving the impression he was "presumably not tracking" the research.
That gap between Fauci's public denials and his private curiosity is central to the ODNI's accusation. If Fauci was engaged enough to seek details from CIA officials about Wuhan experiments, his sworn testimony that he had no knowledge of or participation in such discussions becomes difficult to square.
As Gabbard previously alleged in released files, the trail of taxpayer dollars flowing to the Wuhan lab and the subsequent denials form a pattern that the intelligence community's own records now appear to corroborate, at least in part.
The New York Post reported an additional detail from the declassified material: a whistleblower complaint alleging Fauci lied to Congress about gain-of-function research was deliberately redirected by then-DNI Avril Haines to HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra rather than an impartial inspector general. That routing decision effectively placed the complaint under the authority of a political appointee rather than an independent watchdog.
CIA documents in the release also confirm, the Post reported, that the agency was aware Wuhan Institute of Virology staff became ill in late 2019, before the pandemic spread globally.
Gabbard framed the release in sweeping terms. In a statement accompanying the documents, she said:
"After years of lies, censorship, and cover-ups, the American people deserve transparency, truth, and accountability."
Just The News reported that the declassified package runs several hundred pages and includes findings that Fauci influenced a March 2020 scientific paper dismissing lab-leak origins, a paper that then shaped the National Intelligence Council's understanding of the pandemic. A whistleblower also requested an investigation into whether Fauci committed perjury before Congress regarding gain-of-function research funding.
Gabbard's office described the cover-up in blunt language: "The tactics used to hide the truth are straight from the deep state playbook: politicized self-serving leaders like Dr. Fauci covered up their own wrongdoing and abuses of power, manipulated intelligence, lied to Congress."
Gabbard's tenure at ODNI was defined by a willingness to declassify material that previous administrations kept under wraps. Her office released declassified biolab records that backed concerns officials had once dismissed as misinformation. She also revealed that the U.S. government had funded more than 120 biolabs across 30-plus countries, a disclosure that drew sharp reactions from former public health officials.
She left the position not under political pressure but to care for her husband, who has a rare form of cancer, a departure Fox News Digital first reported.
Gabbard's exit opens a messy transition. Bill Pulte, the construction businessman and former director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, is set to take the reins at ODNI on an interim basis. His appointment has drawn opposition from both sides of the aisle.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune made his displeasure clear:
"We don't need a weaponized DNI, we need professionals there."
Republican Senators John Cornyn, Bill Cassidy, Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, and Thom Tillis have all voiced opposition or concern about Pulte stepping in. On the Democratic side, Senators Elizabeth Warren, Dick Durbin, Sheldon Whitehouse, Richard Blumenthal, Gary Peters, Adam Schiff, Mark Warner, and Ron Wyden have raised their own objections. Warren expressed concern that Pulte would use the intelligence apparatus against the president's political opponents, an allegation rooted in Pulte's controversial tenure at FHFA, where critics accused him of leveraging agency authority to target Trump's adversaries.
Meanwhile, Jay Clayton, the former SEC chairman and Trump's permanent nominee to lead ODNI, remains in confirmation limbo. The president has said he is holding up Clayton's nomination to pressure Congress on a voter identification measure, leaving the nation's intelligence leadership in an extended state of uncertainty.
The bipartisan resistance to Pulte and the stalled Clayton confirmation mean ODNI could operate without a Senate-confirmed leader for weeks or longer. For an office responsible for coordinating the nation's 18 intelligence agencies, that gap carries real consequences.
A CIA whistleblower had previously claimed that Fauci exerted undue influence over the intelligence community's COVID-19 origins assessment. The newly declassified documents appear to lend weight to that claim, though the full scope of the several-hundred-page package has not yet been publicly analyzed in detail.
Gabbard's tenure also saw confrontations with the intelligence establishment over historical records. The CIA was accused of seizing JFK assassination and MKUltra files she had planned to declassify, a dispute that underscored the institutional resistance she faced from career officials throughout her time in office.
Several questions hang over this story. Fauci has not publicly responded to the latest document release. The specific paper he recommended the IC consult, and the identities of its co-authors, remain unclear from the available material. The outcome of the 90-day presidential COVID origins study has not been disclosed. And the legal implications are tangled: Newsmax noted that a perjury statute of limitations may be expiring, while questions surround the scope of a preemptive pardon that the Biden administration reportedly extended to Fauci.
The ODNI press release's language is aggressive, "lied to Congress," "suppress the truth," "immeasurable harm." Those are allegations from an outgoing political appointee's office, not adjudicated findings. But the underlying documents, the emails, the meeting records, the whistleblower routing, are now public. They can be read, scrutinized, and debated on their merits.
That is exactly what accountability looks like. The American public spent years being told that questions about COVID-19's origins were conspiracy theories, that the lab-leak hypothesis was misinformation, and that Fauci's word was beyond reproach. Now the intelligence community's own internal records suggest the story was far more complicated, and far less honest, than the public was led to believe.
Transparency isn't a partisan act. It's the bare minimum a free people should expect from the officials who spend their money, make their policies, and swear oaths in their name.
