WASHINGTON — Tulsi Gabbard, the outgoing director of national intelligence, used her final days in office this week to release a cache of previously classified documents that she says show Anthony S. Fauci, the longtime infectious-disease official and former presidential adviser, misled Congress and helped steer U.S. taxpayer money toward risky coronavirus experiments at a Chinese laboratory.
In an unusually pointed public statement, Ms. Gabbard asserted that the records demonstrate Dr. Fauci “provided millions in U.S. taxpayer dollars to fund dangerous gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology” and then worked behind the scenes with elements of the intelligence community to marginalize the theory that a lab accident could have sparked the COVID‑19 pandemic. She accused him of lying under oath in 2024, saying that “after years of lies and censorship and cover-ups, the American people deserve transparency, truth and accountability.”
The disclosures, delivered on her last day in the intelligence post, instantly reignited a polarizing debate over the origins of the pandemic and the conduct of senior health officials at the height of the crisis. Ms. Gabbard’s allies hailed the move as a long-delayed reckoning with what they describe as a “deep state” effort to shield Dr. Fauci and protect a favored narrative about a natural, animal-to-human spillover. Her critics, including some in the scientific community, warned that she was selectively releasing material and inflaming public distrust of health agencies for political gain.
The documents themselves have not yet been fully cataloged in public, and their ultimate impact may hinge on how congressional committees and future investigators interpret them. Ms. Gabbard nonetheless framed the release in sweeping terms, arguing that the pandemic “caused tremendous hardship and pain for millions of our fellow Americans and countless people around the world” and that the country must confront the possibility that taxpayer-supported research helped midwife the catastrophe. In interviews and media appearances, she has suggested that even a pre-emptive presidential pardon for Dr. Fauci, which she says he sought, would not necessarily insulate him from scrutiny if investigators conclude that he misled lawmakers.
The latest escalation caps a yearslong campaign by Ms. Gabbard to recast Dr. Fauci’s reputation from that of an embattled public-health technocrat to what she describes as a deeply political actor — part scientist, part spin doctor, and, in her telling, a symbol of the excesses of Washington’s pandemic response. The former congresswoman from Hawaii, who left the Democratic Party and later aligned herself with Donald J. Trump, has repeatedly portrayed Dr. Fauci as emblematic of a technocratic elite that misled the public on everything from masks to the virus’s origin.
Her criticism dates back at least to 2022, when she accused Dr. Fauci of “endangering Americans through his deceit during the pandemic” and of promoting what she called “big lies” about masks and mitigation measures. In a cable news appearance that year, she claimed that he urged Americans to “mask up” despite knowing that common cloth and paper masks offered limited protection against infection, and she charged that “they continue to lie to the American people, and it’s putting the American people at risk.” Those remarks, dismissed by many public-health experts as inflammatory and imprecise, nevertheless resonated with an audience already skeptical of mandates and official guidance.
By 2023, Ms. Gabbard’s attacks had sharpened. Appearing on a business news program, she described Dr. Fauci as “not a legitimate scientist,” seizing on a PBS documentary in which he laughed off the possibility of a laboratory accident as the source of the virus. Her complaint was less about the technical details of virology than about what she saw as an attitude of condescension: a senior official brushing aside a theory that, by then, had attracted serious consideration from some intelligence agencies and researchers. The remark underscored her strategy of blending substantive criticism of gain-of-function research with cultural resentment toward what she portrays as an insulated scientific elite.
When Ms. Gabbard became director of national intelligence, she gained formal authority over the analytic arms of the intelligence community that had been tasked with assessing COVID‑19’s origin. She used that perch to press for broader declassification and to align herself with figures who have questioned the safety and utility of experiments that modify viruses to make them more transmissible or lethal. In a 2025 interview with the broadcaster Megyn Kelly, Ms. Gabbard said she was working with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya to “connect the dots” between gain-of-function research and the pandemic. She suggested that Dr. Fauci may have lied under oath about the extent of U.S. funding for such work and indicated that her office was scrutinizing discrepancies between his testimony and internal government communications.
Those claims dovetailed with long-running accusations from some Republicans, including Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, who have alleged that federal agencies routed money through intermediaries to support risky projects at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Dr. Fauci has insisted that the National Institutes of Health did not fund gain-of-function experiments that would have required special review and has repeatedly denied any effort to cover up the origins of COVID‑19. Supporters say he navigated a once-in-a-century pandemic under extraordinary pressure and that his public statements evolved with emerging evidence.
Ms. Gabbard’s insistence that Dr. Fauci worked “hand in hand” with parts of the intelligence community to suppress the lab-leak hypothesis places those long-simmering disputes squarely inside the national security apparatus. In her telling, senior officials used their institutional weight to steer analysts toward a natural-origin theory and to discredit dissenting scientists as conspiracists, even as some classified reporting raised questions about laboratory safety and prior research on bat coronaviruses. Her depiction of the episode as “straight from the Deep State playbook” reflects her broader political project: recasting the pandemic as not just a public-health failure but an emblem of what she sees as systemic deception by entrenched federal bureaucracies.
The stakes in this argument are not purely historical. Ms. Gabbard has linked her criticism of Dr. Fauci to a broader policy agenda aimed at halting gain-of-function research altogether. She has argued that such experiments “have resulted in either a pandemic or some other major health crisis” and that no claimed scientific benefit justifies what she calls an existential risk. That position places her at odds with many virologists, who contend that carefully regulated gain-of-function work can help anticipate viral threats and guide vaccine development, but it aligns with a growing chorus of lawmakers wary of funding projects that might inadvertently arm future pathogens.
Dr. Fauci, who retired from government service but remains a potent symbol in the cultural wars over pandemic policy, has not yet offered a detailed response to Ms. Gabbard’s latest assertions. In previous interviews, he has rejected the suggestion that he misled Congress, saying that any perceived inconsistencies reflect evolving science rather than intent to deceive. He has also warned that sustained attacks on his credibility and on public-health institutions more broadly risk undermining trust the next time a novel pathogen emerges.
The Gabbard–Fauci clash thus encapsulates a deeper tension running through American politics in the pandemic’s aftermath: between demands for accountability, often framed in accusatory terms, and fears that relentless second-guessing will weaken already fragile institutions. For Ms. Gabbard and her supporters, the newly released documents are a vindication of suspicions that powerful figures hid behind the fog of emergency to advance questionable scientific agendas and then shielded themselves from scrutiny. For her critics, the release is another volley in a campaign that conflates legitimate questions about research oversight with sweeping allegations that risk further eroding public confidence in science and government.
As congressional committees signal interest in reviewing the materials Ms. Gabbard has declassified, the long tail of the COVID‑19 era shows little sign of shortening. Questions about what Dr. Fauci knew, what he told lawmakers, and how the federal government managed — or mismanaged — its relationship with foreign laboratories are now intertwined with broader battles over executive power, intelligence transparency and the role of expert authorities in democratic governance. Whether those questions lead to formal investigations, policy reforms or simply more political theater may depend as much on the country’s appetite for revisiting its recent trauma as on any single set of documents.
