House Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan accused Dr. Anthony Fauci of making “false” testimony to Congress earlier this week and requested the former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) director return for another interview about alleged attempts to interfere with investigations into the origins of COVID-19.
In a Friday letter exclusively obtained by The Post, Jordan (R-Ohio) called out Fauci’s participation in President Biden’s COVID-19 Response Team, which pressured Big Tech companies in 2021 to censor critics of COVID lockdowns and other restrictions as well as proponents of the so-called “lab leak theory.”
Jordan also noted that former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Dr. Robert Redfield testified in 2023 to the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic that Fauci “sidelined” him from internal COVID origins debates.
In his testimony Monday before the House COVID subcommittee, Fauci said he “kept an open mind” throughout the pandemic about the possibility of SARS-CoV-2 escaping through a laboratory accident.
“Do you agree that there was a push to downplay the lab leak theory?” Jordan asked him directly.
“None on my part,” Fauci replied.
Jordan in his Friday letter called the testimony “false on its face.”
“During your tenure, the Response Team participated in extensive efforts to unconstitutionally monitor and censor Americans’ speech on social media platforms,” the chairman wrote. “Accordingly, we request that you appear for a transcribed interview and produce documents relevant to our investigation.”
Emails obtained by the House subcommittee and media outlets via Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests show Fauci and then-National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Dr. Francis Collins declined to invite Redfield to join a conference call with top virologists about the origins of the novel coronavirus on Feb. 1, 2020.
That phone call led to the publication of a now-controversial paper, “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” which sought to debunk the lab leak theory and was later cited by Fauci at a White House press conference.
“[A] group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists looked at the sequences … in bats as they evolve and the mutations that it took to get to the point where it is now is totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human,” he told reporters on April 17, 2020, when asked if the virus could have come from a Chinese lab.
“I don’t have the authors right now, but we can make it available to you,” he added — despite having been on a call and traded emails with its co-authors before publication.
Two of those scientists who wrote the study — Dr. Kristian Andersen and Dr. Robert Garry — testified before the subcommittee last year that Fauci “prompted” their work after one of them suggested to the NIAID head that COVID-19 had “unusual features” that “(potentially) look engineered.”
The day before his White House press conference in April 2020, Collins had also emailed Fauci asking if there was “something NIH can do to help put down this very destructive conspiracy, with what seems to be growing momentum.”
“I hoped the Nature Medicine article on the genomic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 would settle this. But probably didn’t get much visibility,” Collins said before asking, “Anything more we can do?”
“I would not do anything about this right now,” Fauci answered the morning of April 17, hours before he would address reporters at the White House. “It is a shiny object that will go away in times [sic].”
Two months earlier, Fauci had said in a podcast interview that there were “conspiracy theories” about COVID-19 leaking out of a lab in Wuhan, China in connection with research done by Beijing’s military.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, in a June 2023 declassified report, found that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) conducted research between 2017 and 2019 on “pathogens and early disease warning capabilities for defensive and biosecurity needs of the military.”
An explosive trove of more than 150 emails released by the House COVID subcommittee last month show that Fauci’s former senior adviser, Dr. David Morens, further participated “in a conspiracy amongst the highest levels” of the agency to “hide” and potentially “destroy official records regarding the origins of COVID-19,” majority staff wrote in a memo.
Fauci in his testimony this week downplayed Morens’ role as an “adviser” and denied having joined in “secret back channel” communications with an NIH grantee that has since been barred from federal funding for conducting experiments at unsafe levels and failing to report risky experiments of viral growth.
Jordan’s panel and the House subcommittee, led by chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), have both requested access to Fauci’s private email records after revealing that Morens worked to protect and reinstate that grantee, Manhattan-based EcoHealth Alliance.
NIH principal deputy director Dr. Lawrence Tabak testified last month to the subcommittee that EcoHealth conducted gain-of-function experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) — but Fauci rejected the assessment in his own grilling.
The president of EcoHealth, Dr. Peter Daszak, has denied wrongdoing and, like Fauci, expressed natural spillover from animals to humans as the most likely origin for COVID-19.
Wenstrup’s panel has since recommended a criminal investigation into Daszak — and floated the possibility of another probe for Morens and others who covered up congressional efforts to shine a light on COVID origins.
Redfield, the FBI and the US Energy Department have said SARS-CoV-2 most likely leaked out of a Chinese lab — and former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe has called it the “only” explanation for the start of the pandemic.
COVID-19 emerged from Wuhan, China, in late 2019 and went on to kill more than 1.1 million Americans.
Jordan’s panel has asked Fauci to hand over all communications and documents between Jan. 1, 2019, and the present related to executive branch suppression of the lab leak theory; coordination with Collins, Daszak and others to evade FOIA or delete federal records; and communication with big tech platforms.
The chairman requested the comprehensive records by June 21 and for a subsequent transcribed interview with Fauci to be scheduled by that date.
Jordan noted that in a federal deposition in November 2022, Fauci said “I do not recall,” “I don’t remember” or similar statements “at least 212 times.”
In a two-day January interview with the House COVID subcommittee, Wenstrup’s staff pointed out that Fauci evaded questions in a similar way “more than 100 times.”
David Schertler, Fauci’s attorney who received the letter from Jordan, declined to comment.
