Anthony Fauci spent five years calling the lab leak a conspiracy theory.
Yesterday a CIA officer sat down in front of Rand Paul's committee and swore an oath to tell the truth about what Fauci actually did.
What he described happening inside the CIA – right before they were about to go public – will make your blood boil.
The Wuhan Lab Scientists Fauci Hand-Picked to Kill the Investigation
James Erdman III is a 13-year CIA Senior Operations Officer who spent the last year leading the Director of National Intelligence's Initiatives Group – the team specifically tasked with investigating COVID origins.
Under oath, before Rand Paul's Senate Homeland Security Committee, Erdman laid out the mechanism.
CIA analysts concluded multiple times between 2021 and 2023 that COVID-19 most likely originated from a lab leak.
Those findings never reached Congress or the public.
"Dr. Fauci's role in the cover-up was intentional," Erdman testified.
"Dr. Fauci influenced the analytical process and findings by leveraging his position to ensure the IC consulted with a conflicted list of curated subject matter experts, public health officials, and scientists."
Fauci did not simply advocate for a position – he stacked the deck by hand-picking which scientists the intelligence community would consult.
Those scientists were his people: researchers he had funded through NIAID for over two decades, several of them authors of the Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2 – the March 2020 paper that declared lab leak a conspiracy theory and shaped global public health policy for years.
Some of those same authors privately believed the virus came from a lab before a Zoom call with Fauci and NIH leadership changed their minds.
At least one collected a $9 million grant from Fauci's agency shortly after reversing his public position.
Fauci's agency paid at least one of them to change their story.
"Management changed the analytic line," Erdman testified.
Six of seven technical experts inside the CIA kept saying lab leak.
Management overruled them.
The Gain-of-Function Network Nobody Was Watching for Twenty Years
Erdman identified the structural mechanism that made the coverup possible: the Biological Sciences Experts Group, known as the BSEG.
Since 2006, the BSEG operated as a classified advisory panel of outside scientists embedded inside the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
Those same scientists were simultaneously drawing federal research grants, holding academic positions, and conducting government-funded pathogen studies – including joint research with Chinese scientists on coronaviruses.
"The BSEG scientists influenced national laboratory WMD research, policy decisions, finished analysis, and other intelligence matters, creating misaligned incentives and conflicts of interest," Erdman testified.
University of North Carolina virologist Ralph Baric – a close collaborator of the Wuhan Institute of Virology on engineering coronaviruses – served on the BSEG and met with Fauci in February 2020, right after the call where scientists privately raised concerns about a lab origin.
No comprehensive oversight monitored how these relationships shaped research, policy, or intelligence conclusions.
Not for twenty years.
In 2015, those same BSEG scientists helped Fauci push through a new definition of gain-of-function research that ended a federal pause on the most dangerous pathogen experiments – the exact category of research that may have produced the virus.
The scientists who rewrote the rules were the same scientists later consulted to evaluate whether those experiments caused the pandemic.
Fauci Walked. His Adviser Got Indicted. Then the CIA Attacked Its Own Witness.
The statute of limitations on charging Fauci for lying to Congress expired Monday, May 11 – two days after Biden's autopen pardon already gave him cover.
Two days later, Erdman sat down in the Senate and described exactly what Fauci did.
The CIA's response was to attack him.
Director of Public Affairs Liz Lyons called the hearing "nothing more than dishonest political theater masquerading as a congressional hearing" and dismissed Erdman as a subpoena witness rather than a truth-teller.
Then she wrote the line that blew up her own statement: "As the CIA has already assessed, COVID-19 most likely originated from a lab leak."
The agency that buried the lab leak conclusion just confirmed it in writing while attacking the man who exposed how they buried it.
Sen. Ron Johnson had seen enough: "This is not political theater. I have years and years and years of built-up frustration of agencies like the CIA, Department of Justice, FBI, HHS, snubbing our oversight. Giving us the big middle finger."
Erdman also revealed the CIA is withholding up to 2,000 pages of classified COVID origins material in violation of a 2023 law requiring disclosure.
Congress passed the COVID Origins Act unanimously.
The deep state ignored it anyway.
Rand Paul has been fighting this since 2021 – five years of hearings, criminal referrals, and confrontations with a man who once pointed his finger across a Senate dais and said, "If anybody is lying here, senator, it is you."
A CIA officer just confirmed under oath who was lying.
The only accountability left is whatever Rand Paul can drag into a hearing room – and what the American people do with what they hear.
Sources:
- Rand Paul Senate Committee Press Release, "Chairman Paul Delivers Opening Remarks During Whistleblower Hearing on the Multi-Agency Cover-Up of COVID-19," Senate HSGAC, May 13, 2026.
- Sean James, "CIA Whistleblower Accuses Anthony Fauci of Covid Cover-Up at Bombshell Hearing," Mediaite, May 13, 2026.
- Sean James, "GOP Senator Rips CIA for Giving 'Big Middle Finger' to Congress Over Covid Investigation," Mediaite, May 13, 2026.
- Ben Smith, "Rand Paul Hearing Explodes After CIA Officer Accuses Fauci of Steering COVID Probe," RedState, May 13, 2026.
- Tyler O'Neil and Adam Shaw, "Rand Paul Brings CIA Whistleblower to Senate Hearing Alleging 'Deep State' COVID-19 Conspiracy," Fox News, May 13, 2026.
- Staff, "CIA Whistleblower Alleges Cover-Up of Lab Leak Intelligence," Daily Caller, May 13, 2026.
- Rep. Nancy Mace Press Release, "Rep. Nancy Mace Calls on DOJ to Indict Fauci Before Statute of Limitations Expires," mace.house.gov, April 29, 2026.
