America’s ultimate ex-bureaucrat may not be out of the woods yet.
South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson leads a 17 state coalition of attorneys general asking Republican congressional leaders whether Anthony Fauci may have violated any state laws not covered by his presidential pardon, according to a Wednesday letter obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The letter seeks information from Senate and House committees that have investigated the issue or have launched investigations. Fauci was granted a preemptive pardon, and has not been charged with any crimes.
“To ensure that former President Biden’s shameful pardon does not frustrate accountability, we urge Congress to consider using all available tools at its disposal,” the letter reads. “Certainly, one potential tool at our disposal is the referral of any pertinent findings to state officials.”
Former President Joe Biden’s blanket pardon of Fauci does not absolve any potential violations of state law or breaches of public trust, according to the letter.
“Although former President Biden attempted to shield potential bad actors—like Dr. Anthony Fauci—from accountability via preemptive pardons, we are confident that state laws may provide a means to hold all actors accountable for their misconduct,” the letter states. “If you believe that further findings or direct evidence that suggests there may have been any violation of state laws, please include us in any actions taken so that we may evaluate state-level courses of action.”
The attorneys general wrote in the letter that they are troubled by the “scope and timing” of the pardon.
The presidential pardon applies to any “offenses against the United States” from Jan. 1, 2014, to the date of the pardon on Jan. 19, Biden’s last full day in office.
Under Fauci, the National Allergy and Infectious Diseases Institute flouted restrictions on gain-of-function research — research that makes a pathogen more deadly or contagious — beginning as early as the initiation of a moratorium on such research in October 2014. NIAID underwrote the exportation of high-risk experiments on novel coronaviruses to Wuhan, China, the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to an investigation by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. The attorneys general expressed concern that the pardon followed soon after the publication of this investigation’s final report.
NIAID allowed American collaborators of the Wuhan Institute of Virology to carve out their own exemption to the moratorium on this research. A subsequent NIAID grant to the U.S.-China collaboration apparently did not receive the required scrutiny from the body that oversees gain-of-function research on deadly viruses, the Enhanced Potential Pandemic Pathogens Committee (P3CO), according to Republican Chair of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs Rand Paul of Kentucky, contradicting Fauci’s assurances under oath that the research received appropriate checks “up and down the chain” of command.
Fauci, from his influential perch at the top of NIAID — which doled out $6.2 billion in research dollars in 2022, the year he retired — was a proponent of gain-of-function research.
“In an unlikely but conceivable turn of events, what if that scientist becomes infected with the virus, which leads to an outbreak and ultimately triggers a pandemic?” Fauci wrote in 2012. “Scientists working in this field might say – as indeed I have said – that the benefits of such experiments and the resulting knowledge outweigh the risks.”
The letter also flags concerns about Fauci’s assertions under oath that the NIAID did not fund gain-of-function in Wuhan, his undisclosed influence on the public debate about the pandemic’s origins through his participation in a high-impact scientific paper that dismissed the possibility, and his recommendations for responding to the COVID-19 lacking adequate evidence.
Despite the pardon, state attorneys general, congressional investigators and the incoming leader of the National Institutes of Health, health economist and physician-scientist Jay Battacharya, have all expressed a desire to understand the lapses in oversight that allowed for coronavirus gain-of-function research to be conducted in Wuhan at an inadequate safety level and whether it contributed to the worst pandemic in a century.
The letter follows the opening salvos from two committees in the Senate, now under Republican control, investigating the matter. Paul announced on Jan. 27 subpoenas for records from 14 agencies, seeking to uncover information relevant to the origins of COVID-19 and high-risk biological technology more generally. Permanent Select Subcommittee on Investigations Chair Ron Johnson of Wisconsin issued a subpoena to the Department of Health and Human Services on Jan. 29 for records pertaining to COVID-19, including approximately 50 pages of Fauci’s emails.
Three intelligence agencies — the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Energy — have assessed that a lab accident is the more likely source of COVID-19. Yet the possibility has been largely dismissed by Fauci. When asked about the lab leak hypothesis in April 2020, Fauci countered that the virus was totally consistent with natural evolution, citing a paper in the journal Nature Medicine titled “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2.”
Fauci never disclosed that he had participated in the teleconference in which the article was first proposed and had been privy to early drafts until it was revealed through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
Fauci has said that he had no influence over the paper’s ultimate conclusion: that any lab origin scenario was “implausible.” Fact checkers working with social media giant Meta and YouTube cited Fauci’s statements and the Nature Medicine paper to dismiss the lab origin scenario as a “conspiracy theory” or a “baseless claim.” Social media users and media outlets reporting on the possibility faced censorship.
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