Anthony Fauci's top aide just pleaded guilty to destroying federal records to cover up COVID research.
Now newly obtained documents prove Fauci gave the same illegal order years before COVID arrived.
The words Fauci typed directly contradict the sworn testimony he gave Congress in 2024.
Fauci Gain of Function Emails Reveal a Pattern of Perjury
On August 19, Dr. Anthony Fauci's longtime senior adviser at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. David Morens, walked into federal court in Greenbelt, Maryland, and pleaded guilty to conspiracy to conceal federal records.
Morens had been routing official NIH communications through his personal Gmail account to dodge FOIA open records requests – working to restore a terminated bat-coronavirus grant and bury the argument that COVID-19 leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
It was exactly the kind of record destruction that Fauci swore before Congress he had never committed.
Ten days later, documents obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation proved he had.
The newly surfaced email dates to March 2012, more than eight years before COVID-19 emerged.
At the time, Fauci's institute was funding Dutch virologist Ron Fouchier, who had engineered an airborne strain of bird flu with an estimated 50 percent fatality rate – a pathogen Fouchier himself described as "probably one of the most dangerous viruses you can make."
New York Times science writer Phil Boffey was raising alarms in print, warning that NIH had created an "engineered doomsday" capable of killing hundreds of millions of people.
Fauci didn't like that.
He fired off an email to NIH Director Francis Collins calling Boffey "really off base" and "a mischievous guy."
The next morning, he sent a more candid message to a subordinate, complaining that people were "getting to Phil Boffey and he is swallowing it."
Then came the order.
"Please delete this e-mail and then delete from the deleted file," Fauci wrote from his official NIH government account.
That instruction, issued to a subordinate on a federal email system, violates 18 U.S.C. § 2071 – a statute carrying up to three years in prison for willfully concealing or destroying government records.
Rand Paul Documents Three Violations of Federal Records Law
This is not the first time Rand Paul has caught Fauci erasing his tracks.
The Kentucky Republican and Senate Homeland Security Committee chairman previously highlighted two separate instances from 2020 in which Fauci sought to delete government communications.
Fauci maintained under sworn testimony in 2024 that he had never destroyed official records.
That testimony is now a problem.
Biden's preemptive pardon covers Fauci's conduct from January 1, 2014, through January 19, 2025 – but the 2012 email sits entirely outside that window.
Perjury is outside the pardon too.
Paul referred the contempt case to the DOJ earlier this month after Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment rights 111 times at a July 29 Senate hearing, declining to answer a single question about COVID's origins, NIH funding, or the Wuhan lab.
Paul's argument is blunt: a man who received a blanket pardon for his COVID-era conduct has nothing left to fear from truthful testimony.
The only reason to plead the Fifth that many times is if the truth is worse than the silence.
David Moren's Guilty Plea Proves the COVID Cover-Up Went Beyond One Email
The Morens guilty plea is not a sidebar to the Fauci story. It is the blueprint.
Morens and his co-conspirators put their arrangement in writing – using his personal Gmail to keep official bat-coronavirus grant communications out of reach of federal investigators entirely.
Federal prosecutors described the scheme as a coordinated effort to defraud the United States and counter the argument that COVID-19 originated in a lab.
Hiding federal records at NIAID was not one rogue adviser acting alone.
It was organized.
The rot runs deeper still. Fouchier – the same virologist whose dangerous bird flu work Fauci was trying to bury criticism of in 2012 – later inserted himself into the COVID origins debate.
He helped shape "The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2," the paper Fauci repeatedly cited to dismiss lab leak concerns, while its own authors privately called him "unbelievably conflicted" and noted he had no interest in the public ever knowing COVID might have escaped from a lab.
The man who spent 38 years running America's premier infectious disease institute spent that time making sure certain conversations never saw daylight.
The documents are seeing daylight now.
And Rand Paul is just getting started.
Sources:
- Emily Kopp, "Exclusive: 'Delete From the Deleted File' – Fauci Tried to Destroy Gain-of-Function Research Email, New Docs Reveal," Daily Caller, August 28, 2026.
- "Former Senior NIAID Official Pleads Guilty to Charges Connected to Concealing Federal Records During COVID-19 Pandemic," U.S. Department of Justice, August 19, 2026.
- Alex Miller and Elizabeth Elkind, "Fauci Held in Contempt as COVID Cellphone Lands in Hands of Senate Investigators," Fox News, August 6, 2026.
- Kyle Becker, "Fauci Deleted 'Doomsday' Email on Gain-of-Function Research, New Documents Reveal," RedState, August 29, 2026.
