Anthony Fauci became defensive and bristled when the CIA briefed him on undisclosed coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a newly released diary reveals.
“In the matter [sic] in which she [one of the CIA briefers] was asking me questions almost made me believe she was grilling me prompting me to say somewhat tongue in cheek whether I should have a lawyer with me,” Fauci said in his June 4, 2021, diary entry.
Fauci’s diary provides the clearest insight yet into classified CIA intelligence on the origins of COVID-19. It includes the revelation that the Wuhan lab was experimenting with coronaviruses sampled from pangolins, which harbor coronaviruses closely related to COVID-19.
Sen. Rand Paul released the diary on July 25. Fauci appeared before Paul’s Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee for a high-stakes showdown Wednesday, where he immediately invoked the Fifth Amendment.
The new documents confirm that the CIA obtained signals intelligence (SIGINT) regarding conversations in Wuhan at the height of the COVID pandemic.
American spies overheard communications about experiments the lab had never disclosed to the global scientific community. Some of the experiments were conducted with the Chinese military, according to Fauci’s account of the CIA briefing.
The CIA officer informed Fauci that the Wuhan lab had collected pangolin viruses in the field and received other pangolin viruses from a research group in Beijing. The lab experimented on those pangolin coronaviruses in “transgenic” mice, a reference to genetically-modified mice. Experiments in transgenic mice can evolve viruses to better infect humans.
Fauci described the CIA’s briefing as “naive” and “extremely strange,” without providing any scientific rationale as to why the intelligence should be dismissed.
The Daily Caller News Foundation first reported last year that the U.S. had collected SIGINT sent between Beijing and Wuhan by Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leaders in 2019.
Fauci and the CIA didn’t respond to a request for comment by deadline.
“The main thing is, the path for a pangolin virus to emerge in Wuhan is clearer now and it’s through the WIV,” Alina Chan, the author of “VIRAL: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19,” told the DCNF. “The [wet] market didn’t sell any live pangolins, as a study conducted before the pandemic showed.”
Virologists first hypothesized that pangolins may have been the source of COVID in early 2020 after South China Agricultural University announced that it had isolated a pangolin coronavirus from the country’s Guangdong Province, which was 99% similar to the new coronavirus.
But by the time the university’s data was published in full, it was clear the pangolin viruses would not settle the origins question. One pangolin gene was 99% identical to COVID, but another key gene was only 85% similar and did not have the pandemic virus’s most distinct feature: a mutation known as a furin cleavage site.
The documents provide the most complete evidence yet of what the CIA uncovered about the largest pandemic in a century.
The CIA assessed the pandemic was likely the result of a lab leak within days of CIA Director John Ratcliffe taking the helm in 2025, but the intelligence informing that assessment remains out of public view. That intelligence remains classified despite a 2023 law requiring its disclosure and former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s declassification push, which the CIA resisted, according to CIA whistleblower Jim Erdman.
The summer of 2021 proved to be a turning point in the COVID origins debate.
Scripps Institute virologist Kristian Andersen alerted Fauci in June 2021 that the virus looked inconsistent with natural evolution, the documents show. The two became the world’s most prominent advocates for the wet market theory.
In August 2021, a Marine Corps officer working with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency blew the whistle about a research proposal involving the Wuhan lab and cleavage sites like the distinct one found in the COVID virus.
‘Card-Carrying Virologists’
Fauci met with Beth Cameron, senior director for intelligence programs at the National Security Council (NSC) on June 7, 2021, days after the CIA briefing. He received a personal briefing detailing what the NSC had presented to the president a week earlier.
The meeting may have been called in part because of Fauci’s alarm over the CIA briefing. Fauci also called previous CIA briefings “catastrophic,” noting that they were presented by “amateurs.”
During the June 7 meeting, Fauci urged the NSC to consult with the virologists in his inner circle, a small clique he had privately worked with on public messaging about the COVID origins issue since February 2020.
Though unknown to Fauci at the time, one of these “card-carrying virologists,” hearing about the pangolin viruses through the grapevine, did think it was significant.
“Do we know about WIV working in pangolin CoVs [coronaviruses] in the lab? If so, that’s huge,” Andersen wrote in a June 4, 2021, Slack message to his colleagues, according to other documents released by Paul.
Another one of the “card-carrying” virologists in Fauci’s inner circle had expressed concern months earlier that a pangolin virus could have escaped from a research group studying them in southern China, before it was known that the Wuhan lab had its own pangolin viruses.
Cameron and Andersen did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
‘Very Disappointing Briefings’
The June 4 passage in Fauci’s diary also suggests the CIA briefing was not the first instance of Fauci dismissing the spy agency.
“It was very similar to some of the very disappointing briefings that I had previously received in prior years from the CIA,” Fauci noted.
Fauci had for decades advocated gain-of-function (GOF) research despite the concerns of some about its impact on national security.
Paul on Monday also released earlier diary entries from the beginning of America’s buildup in biodefense. This biodefense buildup was initiated by Vice President Dick Cheney after the 2001 anthrax scare and led by Fauci.
Those documents shed light on Fauci’s disapproval of the scientists and journalists who opposed GOF because of concerns about global biosecurity.
(DCNF)
