Anthony Fauci spent decades telling the public he ran a civilian health agency.
Documents now in the permanent congressional record tell a very different story.
And what Senator Rand Paul just pulled into the open about Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the CIA is going to leave a lot of people demanding answers.
What the Documents Actually Show
The Daily Caller News Foundation obtained an undated interagency agreement between the CIA and Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases that confirms the two agencies ran a formal research collaboration. The CIA’s Biological Technology Center initiated the collaboration on “forensic microbiology” on bioterrorism bugs for the intelligence community.
CIA funds would be used to leverage pre-existing civilian research efforts in a way that would benefit both CIA and NIH, and unclassified basic research on viruses “will be used to augment and complement” CIA research and development, the document states.
The CIA had “robust” capabilities to detect and identify viruses but wanted to go further, the documents indicate. The project sought to do “forensic comparative analyses,” but the documents do not define this term.
The CIA would help NIAID obtain the germs, the contract shows. Work produced under the collaboration would be considered sensitive, not classified, but the CIA must give permission before data were shared.
Read that last part again. A civilian public health agency, run by a man who would later become the face of pandemic policy for the entire country, could not release its own research data without first getting clearance from the CIA. That is not how a public health institute is supposed to operate.
NIAID may not have been the only federal agency the CIA worked with on the project. The CIA is “leveraging partnerships across government agencies wherever possible to support and further develop robust forensic microbiology capability,” the documents state.
Cheney, Bush, and the Post-9/11 Biodefense Overhaul
Fauci collaborated with President George W Bush to remake the NIAID into a biodefense research hub in the shadow of the 9/11 anthrax attacks, according to public reporting. But the newly released documents show the intelligence community’s fingerprints on that transformation go far deeper than the public ever knew.
Rutgers University chemistry professor Richard Ebright reviewed the documents and did not soften his assessment. “Vice President Cheney assigned Fauci to head US biodefense research programs in 2002, including bioweapons-agents-development and bioweapons-agents-characterization research programs that approached, and arguably crossed, red lines set by the Biological Weapons Convention,” said Ebright, a longtime critic of NIAID’s pivot to this work, after reviewing documents shared by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“The documents show early steps in the process of transferring funding for, and direction of, CIA and DoD biodefense projects to Fauci’s agency, NIAID.”
That is a Rutgers chemistry professor, not a political commentator, saying that Fauci’s agency may have crossed legal lines on biological weapons research. That deserves more than a news cycle.
A November 2003 CIA memo titled “The Darker Bioweapons Future” highlighted by Paul’s team describes the rationale for biologists working hand-in-glove with spies. Making nuclear weapons requires resource-intensive enrichment that rival nations may detect, the CIA said in the memo. But detecting biological weapons is much harder, especially with rapid advances in biotechnology.
The memo revealed that a group from the National Academy of Sciences told the CIA that in order to detect biological weapons, intelligence agencies needed more assets in biology labs around the world. Sniffing out biological weapons will require “a much closer — and perhaps qualitatively different — working relationship between the intelligence and biological sciences communities,” the memo reads.
The memo notes that academics had gotten over their Vietnam-era skepticism of the national security establishment and “would be more open to collaboration.” In other words, the CIA saw an opening, and Fauci’s agency was exactly what they needed to walk through it.
Fauci Took the Fifth 111 Times — Then Got Held in Contempt
None of this fell out of the sky. Senator Rand Paul, the Kentucky Republican who chairs the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, has spent years building this case piece by piece. The documents were entered into the permanent congressional record following Fauci’s appearance before Paul’s committee.
The release covers records entered into the record for the July 29, 2026 hearing where Dr Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment 111 times and was later held in contempt of Congress.
The documents show that Fauci repeatedly asked colleagues to delete emails he sent, he pointed the intelligence community working on assessing the origin of COVID-19 to the conflicted authors of the Proximal Origin paper, and CIA transferred funds to NIAID for work shielded from public release.
Additionally, they show that in September 2015, the CIA asked BSEG for information on MERS-CoV mutation frequency and an assessment of human-passage risk and that CIA took pandemic advice from a sitting Pfizer board member.
That last detail is worth sitting with. The CIA was taking pandemic advice from someone who sat on the board of one of the world’s largest vaccine manufacturers. And Fauci’s agency was the civilian engine powering the whole operation.
Fauci repeatedly invoked his right against self-incrimination despite having been granted a sweeping pardon by former President Joe Biden amid allegations that he misled Congress and the public about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Biden pardoned Fauci on his last day in office. Then Fauci turned around and pleaded the Fifth 111 times anyway. Republicans on the committee pointed out the obvious: if the pardon protects him from federal prosecution, he has no legal basis to refuse questioning. A CIA whistleblower told the Senate that Fauci deliberately steered intelligence agencies away from the lab-leak conclusion, an allegation that makes his refusal to answer committee questions all the more significant.
Paul’s investigation also pulled in testimony from a CIA whistleblower who had a specific warning about where all of this intelligence-community biology work was leading. A CIA whistleblower told Paul’s committee in written testimony that biology work undertaken on behalf of US intelligence “incentivized dangerous research at US labs and abroad.”
That is a CIA insider, not a Republican senator, saying that the intelligence community’s involvement in biodefense research pushed labs toward work that was dangerous. And Fauci’s NIAID sat at the center of that ecosystem for decades.
What the Permanent Record Now Shows
The media spent years treating anyone who raised questions about Fauci’s relationship with the intelligence community as a crank. The documents now sitting in the permanent congressional record are not the product of speculation. They are the product of a formal interagency agreement, CIA funding transfers, and a contractual arrangement that gave the CIA veto power over what NIAID could publicly release.
The public health establishment told Americans throughout the COVID-19 era that the science was settled, that the lab-leak theory was a conspiracy theory, and that Fauci was simply a dedicated doctor trying to save lives. The picture that emerges from these documents is considerably more complicated.
Fauci served as NIAID director from 1984 until 2022. That is 38 years. The CIA-NIAID agreement, the biodefense funding surge under Vice President Cheney, the MERS-CoV consultation, the Pfizer board member advising the CIA — none of these things happened without Fauci’s knowledge or participation. And when he finally sat before a Senate committee and was asked about it directly, he refused to answer 111 times.
Senator Paul put it plainly after the committee voted to hold Fauci in contempt. “He said one thing in public and another in private, controlled the narrative, and put politics above truth. Without real reform, the next unelected bureaucrat will do it again.”
That is the real story here. Not just what Fauci did, but what the system allowed him to do for four decades without any meaningful accountability. The intelligence community, the pharmaceutical industry, and a civilian health agency all became entangled in ways the American public was never told about. The COVID-19 pandemic did not create that entanglement. It exposed it.
And the documents that Rand Paul just entered into the permanent congressional record make it a lot harder to pretend otherwise.
Sources: Daily Caller News Foundation; Senator Rand Paul Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Reading Room; Daily Signal; Fox News
