Chairman Rand Paul of the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs has released a massive new cache of documents. The release outlines an extensive, decades-long relationship between Dr. Anthony Fauci and the U.S. national security apparatus, highlighting his influence over the COVID-19 origins debate among scientists and the intelligence community.
This expanded document dump follows a May 13, 2026, committee hearing featuring testimony from CIA whistleblower James Erdman. Erdman told lawmakers that Fauci actively steered intelligence analysts assessing the origins of COVID-19 toward NIH-funded scientists, specifically those behind the widely cited “Proximal Origin” paper.
According to the committee’s timeline, Fauci’s ties to the intelligence community date back to at least August 2003, when he served as a formal reviewer for a National Intelligence Council paper on SARS. A few months later, he received a CIA report titled “The Darker Bioweapons Future.”
In September 2007, he was invited by Robert Joseph and Ash Carter to meet with a review panel looking at future directions for the Defense Threat Reduction Agency’s activities regarding weapons of mass destruction. By March 2020, he was invited to speak to JASON, a secretive advisory group for national security agencies.
The records also shed light on the frantic early days of the pandemic. On January 31, 2020, scientist Kristian Andersen emailed Fauci with concerns about the virus’s furin cleavage site. Fauci told Andersen to quickly gather evolutionary biologists to evaluate the data. If they agreed on the concerns, Fauci said they should report it to the proper authorities. “I would imagine that in the USA this would be the FBI and in the UK it would be MI5,” Fauci wrote.
The next day, Fauci joined a conference call with a group of scientists to discuss whether the virus looked engineered. Several of those scientists went on to draft the “Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” paper. On March 6, 2020, Andersen emailed Fauci and then-NIH Director Francis Collins to say the paper would be published in Nature Medicine, thanking them for their “advice and leadership.” Collins then forwarded the email within the NIH, noting that he and Fauci had helped “but are appropriately not mentioned explicitly.” When published, the paper firmly concluded that the virus “is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.”
Adding significant new context to the release is a declassified August 2021 memo from a Marine Corps fellow at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The memo boldly asserts that SARS-CoV-2 is an “American-created recombinant bat vaccine, or its precursor virus.”
According to this document, the EcoHealth Alliance submitted a proposal called DEFUSE to DARPA in 2018. The plan was to inoculate bats in Chinese caves against coronaviruses using an aerosolized spray. DARPA reportedly rejected the proposal because the work was too close to a gain-of-function moratorium. However, the memo alleges the work proceeded anyway at the Wuhan Institute of Virology with funding from other channels.
The DARPA fellow wrote that the virus “leaked and spread rapidly because it was aerosolized so it could efficiently infect bats in caves, but it was not ready to infect bats yet.”
As the origins debate heated up in 2021, President Biden ordered the intelligence community to conduct a 90-day review. During this time, HHS and the National Security Council (NSC) worked to grant Fauci access to highly classified materials. Emails show HHS officials arranging “one-time read-ins” for Fauci across roughly nine special access compartments so he could attend a meeting in a secure facility (SCIF).
A day after one of these classified reading-room sessions in June 2021, Fauci emailed the NSC a new preprint of a paper by the exact same authors of the Proximal Origin study. Recommending the paper to the intelligence officials, he called the authors “a group of highly qualified virologists” and pointedly noted that the research “summarizes what I said yesterday.”
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