Republican Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul said in a “Fox & Friends” interview on Thursday he took an “extraordinary step” against former White House senior medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Paul contacted Matthew Graves, the U.S. attorney in Washington D.C., to prosecute Fauci for allegedly lying to Congress about the National Institutes of Health (NIH) having no involvement of gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The lab in Wuhan, China, used gain-of-function research to study and experiment with coronaviruses.
“We have an incredibly partisan Attorney General Garland who’s refusing to act,” Paul said. “So I’ve taken the extraordinary step of actually going to the local U.S. attorney in D.C. to see if he will act. Now the problem is there are partisans literally throughout the legal system and people are seeing this, you don’t get prosecuted if you’re a Democrat in this administration, no matter what you do.”
Fauci said the “smoking gun” of the newest criminal referral is Fauci saying in private emails from 2020 that the NIH suspected coronavirus leaking from the lab because of gain-of-function research experiments. The NIH admitted in 2021 it did fund gain-of-function research through global nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance. (RELATED: Rand Paul Grills Dr. Fauci For Trying To Suppress Lab-Leak Theory)
The senator originally issued the first criminal referral in July 2021 to the Department of Justice (DOJ) after the two got into a heated argument about gain-of-function research during a Senate hearing. After the DOJ took no action on the referral, Paul filed a new one in July 2023 after the discovery of Fauci’s emails about gain-of-function.
Paul and Fauci got into multiple spats throughout 2020 and 2021 about the origins of COVID and Fauci’s continuous denial that his agencies have had any involvement with gain-of-function research. Paul eventually called on Fauci to resign in November 2021 for refusing to admit the NIH funded the experimentations in Wuhan.
Gain-of-function research involves genetically altering pathogens to make them more infectious, more deadly or both for research purposes. It is believed COVID-19 began after leaking from the lab after the corporate media and Democratic politicians had cast aside the theory as a right-wing conspiracy.