Rand Paul announces 'official criminal referral,' claims email shows Fauci COVID testimony 'absolutely a lie'

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Sen Rand Paul: I've referred Fauci to the DOJ for prosecution

Senate Health committee member Rand Paul, R-Ky., joins ‘The Ingraham Angle’ to discuss his office catching fire and government emails over COVID.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., announced an "official criminal referral" to the Department of Justice regarding Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Paul pointed to an email from February 2020 in which Fauci detailed a call with British medical researcher Jeremy Farrar, who was director of the Wellcome Trust at the time. According to Fauci, those on the task force call, including Francis Collins, former Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, and other "highly credible" scientists with expertise in evolutionary biology, expressed concern about the "fact upon viewing the sequences of several isolates of the nCoV, there were mutations in the virus that would be most unusual to have evolved naturally in the bats and that there was a suspicion that this mutation was intentionally inserted." 

"The suspicion was heightened by the fact that scientists in Wuhan University are known to have been working on gain-of-function experiments to determine the molecular mechanisms associated with bat viruses adapting to human infection, and the outbreak originated in Wuhan," Fauci wrote, according to a screenshot of the newly unredacted email shared by RealClearPolitics White House reporter Philip Wegmann. 

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Sen. Rand Paul questions Dr. Anthony Fauci during a Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions hearing about the federal response to monkeypox, on Capitol Hill, Sept. 14, 2022.(Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

"This directly contradicts everything he said in committee hearing to me, denying absolutely that they funded any gain of function, and it’s absolutely a lie. That’s why I sent an official criminal referral to the DOJ," Paul wrote on "X," formerly known as Twitter, on Saturday. 

In July 2021, Paul reminded Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and medical adviser to the president, that lying to Congress is a federal crime, suggesting the NIAID director had done so regarding COVID-19 gain-of-function research conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. 

Dr. Anthony Fauci responds to questions from Sen. Rand Paul during a Senate hearing regarding the federal response to COVID-19 on Jan. 11, 2022, in Washington, D.C. (Greg Nash-Pool/Getty Images)

During a heated exchange, Fauci insisted he had "never lied before Congress" during a prior testimony that May, telling Paul, "you don't know what you're talking about." Fauci further denied the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded gain-of-function research, despite Paul citing a journal article titled, "Discovery of a rich gene pool of bat SARS-related coronaviruses." 

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Paul noted how the paper’s author credits the NIH and lists the actual number of the grant given by the NIH. The author took two bat coronavirus spike genes and combined them with SARs related backbone to create new viruses that are not found in nature. The lab-created viruses were then shown to replicate in humans, Paul, who graduated from Duke University School of Medicine and was a practicing doctor before being elected to Congress, surmised of the article during the congressional hearing. 

 "Viruses that in nature only infect animals were manipulated in the Wuhan lab to gain the functionof infecting humans," Paul said. 

Sen. Rand Paul questions Dr. Anthony Fauci during a Senate hearing on Capitol Hill on July 20, 2021. (J. Scott Applewhite/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)

Fauci said the paper Paul referred to "was judged by qualified staff up and down the chain as not being gain of function."

"Let’s read from the NIH definition of gain of function. This is your definition that you guys wrote. It says that ‘scientific research that increases the transmissibility among mammals is gain of function.’ They took animal viruses that only occur in animals, and they increased their transmissibility to humans," Paul said. "How you can say that’s not gain of function – it’s a dance, and you’re dancing around this because you’re trying to obscure responsibility for 4 million people dying around the world from a pandemic."