On Thursday, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) announced that he has called on the U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., to pursue perjury charges against former White House senior medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci, in light of new “smoking gun” evidence that Fauci lied to Congress about the origin of the coronavirus.
At issue is Fauci’s insistence that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) never funded “gain-of-function” research, which studies how deadly viruses (such as the coronavirus) can be made to harm humans, at the Wuhan lab in China.
“I don’t think there’s ever been a clearer case of perjury, in the history of government testimony. And, I don’t say that lightly,” Sen. Paul said in an interview with “Fox & Friends,” discussing claims made by Fauci in a newly-obtained private email from 2020.
“So, he’s caught dead-to-rights here,” Sen. Paul said, detailing how Fauci’s sworn testimony to Congress contradicts his assertions in the private email:
“He said, adamantly, [in testimony to Congress] that the government never funded this gain-of-function research.
“We now have the Government Accountability Office, the GAO, has admitted that the funding came from the NIH.
“We have the acting director, Tabak, of the NIH admitting it in writing that it came from the NIH.
“But, now we have, really, the smoking gun – and that is Fauci, in private, saying the opposite of what he was saying in public. When he was publicly telling me that, absolutely, we do not fund gain-of-function research in China.
“He says privately, ‘We are suspicious that the virus has been manipulated, and we are suspicious because we know they are doing gain-of-function research.’
“He then goes on to describe the research – and it’s exactly the research that the NIH funded.”
After Fauci testified in 2021 that the “The NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” Sen. Paul later gave Fauci the chance to retract his claim. Fauci flatly refused to do so:
Sen. Paul: “Knowing that it is a crime to lie to Congress, do you wish to retract your statement of May 11 where you claim that the NIH never funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan?”
Dr. Fauci: “Senator Paul, I have never lied before the Congress and I do not retract that statement.”
In Thursday’s interview, Sen. Paul explained that he’s taken the case to the D.C. attorney because U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland has refused to do his job:
“We have an incredibly partisan Attorney General Garland who’s refusing to act. 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.”
Unfortunately, Paul said, there’s systemic bias throughout the Biden Administration’s two-tiered and weaponized justice system, which protects Democrats from prosecution, regardless of the evidence:
“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.”