Paul: New Fauci Records Show Email Destruction and Previously Unknown Gain-of-Function Work

Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Rand Paul said Wednesday his investigators have found additional evidence of federal-record destruction around Dr. Anthony Fauci and communications about gain-of-function programs the committee did not previously know existed. He spoke on the Just the News, No Noise television program. He said more material would be released in the coming week.

“We will have some more explosive information that comes out in the next week, though, that some of the communications between Anthony Fauci and his assistant involved some programs that are very worrisome, gain-of-function programs that we didn’t know existed until we came across these emails,” Paul said. Gain-of-function research, as Paul has used the term, refers to work that can increase a virus’s transmissibility or lethality in humans. Fauci has long maintained that NIH-funded studies did not meet the government’s restricted definition of that research.

Paul said the new trail came from Fauci’s government computer logs, phone, and diary. “By looking at Anthony Fauci’s logs that he was keeping on a government computer, we discovered that his assistant was bragging to him in one of the emails. ‘Hey, Dr. Fauci, I was able to destroy tons of your emails this weekend.’ Well, that’s illegal.” Federal law generally requires preservation of official email under the Federal Records Act. Paul said the committee tried to grant prosecutorial immunity to a former top Fauci aide so that person could testify; the effort failed. After the failed vote he said he planned a Justice Department referral on the assistant.

The same committee has already published earlier instructions from Fauci to delete messages. On Feb. 2, 2020, the day after a private origins call with other scientists, Fauci wrote NIH Director Francis Collins, “Please delete this e-mail after you read it.” On July 20, 2020, he told chief of staff Greg Folkers the same. In 2024 Fauci testified that he did not delete federal records. Paul has asked which account is accurate: Fauci’s testimony or the assistant’s email about destroying “tons” of messages. Former Fauci senior adviser David Morens has already been charged with concealing and destroying government records and is awaiting trial.

Fauci appeared under subpoena before Paul’s committee on July 29 and invoked the Fifth Amendment 111 times. The panel later voted to hold him in contempt. President Biden issued Fauci a pardon covering conduct back to 2014. Paul has said he referred Fauci to the Justice Department twice during the Biden administration and twice after Trump returned to office and that those referrals were not acted on. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. previously turned over Fauci diary files found on government servers; Paul’s office posted large portions in a public “Reading Room.”

Paul said the newest emails describe gain-of-function work beyond what the committee had already tied to EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. He has argued for years that Fauci issued exemptions during a federal moratorium and that some of that work went to Wuhan. Fauci told the Senate on May 11, 2021, that NIH “has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” a statement he later defended under a narrower definition. The committee’s earlier releases also show Fauci pointing intelligence officials toward the authors of the “Proximal Origin” paper that argued against a laboratory source. Paul said Democrats on the panel, and some Republicans, have resisted putting the newest material in public view. He did not name the previously undisclosed programs in Wednesday’s interview and said those details would come with the next document release.