A federal whistleblower complaint accusing Anthony Fauci of lying under oath to a Senate committee about gain-of-function research was routed, in August 2021, to Fauci’s own cabinet boss. It did not go to the independent watchdog whose job is exactly that kind of allegation. The cabinet was told. The Inspector General who could have opened an investigation was not. The paper trail is now public.

A complaint went to the man with the most political reason to bury it.

On August 11, 2021, Tamara Johnson, then Acting Inspector General of the Intelligence Community, sent a two-page memo to Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines. The subject was a whistleblower complaint. The complaint letter attached to it alleged that Fauci, then director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, had given false testimony to Congress about gain-of-function research funded by the National Institutes of Health. Eight days later, on August 19, the ODNI’s general counsel, Christopher Fonzone, finished an internal follow-up naming the two specific Fauci statements at issue.

The first was Fauci’s May 11, 2021 testimony before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, where he told Senator Rand Paul that “the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain of function research in the Wuhan Institute.” The second was Fauci’s July 20, 2021 return appearance before the same committee, when Paul gave him the chance to retract that line and he declined.

Fonzone’s memo did not recommend referring the matter to the Department of Health and Human Services Inspector General, whose office is the independent investigator for HHS misconduct allegations. It recommended sending the file to Xavier Becerra, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, who would have been the official deciding whether his own department’s most prominent appointee should face discipline.

The disposition was, on its own terms, almost elegant. The IC Inspector General declined to escalate on the reasoning that Fauci was not an intelligence officer and the gain-of-function dispute was already a matter of public argument. Becerra had been brought in before the decision was made: per Paul Thacker’s reporting on the records, Haines met with Becerra about how to handle the complaint, with the classified nature of some underlying material offered as a partial reason for steering it away from the HHS IG. Becerra got the file. The HHS Inspector General never did.

Earlier this month, Becerra won the Democratic nomination for governor of California. He will face Republican Steve Hilton in November. His record as HHS Secretary during the second half of the COVID-19 pandemic is part of the campaign. As of June 18, that record also includes the August 2021 decision not to forward to his department’s independent Inspector General a written allegation that his department’s senior infectious-disease official had lied to Congress about a federal grant program he supervised. The records were sealed until last week. The voters now deciding his race have had them for a few days.

Fauci himself, after the complaint was buried, was asked the question again. In his 2024 testimony before Representative Brad Wenstrup’s House subcommittee, asked whether he had communicated with intelligence agencies about viral research connected to COVID-19, he answered, “not to my knowledge about COVID.” The materials released this week include communications in which intelligence officials considered Fauci as an outside reviewer of an IC origins assessment and discussed rejecting him as conflicted, and in which he was in active contact with IC leadership on origins questions in 2020. The 2024 testimony, on the record, conflicts with the 2020 paper trail.

In the last weeks of his presidency in January 2025, President Joe Biden granted Fauci a preemptive pardon covering any non-violent federal offenses he may have committed across an eleven-year window ending the day Biden left office. The pardon was framed publicly as protection against retributive prosecution by the incoming Trump administration. Its operational effect is wider: it forecloses any future federal prosecution within the covered window, whether or not anything was charged. That window contains both the May and July 2021 Senate appearances.

The documents released this week do not prove that Fauci lied. They could not, because the only office that could have tested the allegation never had the file. The IC Inspector General said the question was outside his jurisdiction. The HHS Inspector General was not given the referral. Becerra was given it, and the public record shows no action. Fauci has consistently denied that NIH funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and whether the EcoHealth Alliance subgrants meet the relevant federal definitions of gain-of-function research is technically contested.

What the records do establish is who got the complaint, who did not, and who decided which was which. A federal whistleblower filed a written allegation of false sworn testimony by a senior official. The general counsel’s memo identified the same two specific statements the whistleblower had identified. The file was then routed inside the cabinet, to the political appointee in charge of the official it accused, instead of the independent investigator who exists for that purpose. The Senate HELP Committee, whose testimony was at issue, does not appear in the released records as having been notified. Rand Paul, the senator the disputed testimony was given to, does not appear in them either.

The materials were declassified by Tulsi Gabbard on her last day as Director of National Intelligence, and posted online the next day by Thacker. The intelligence community still holds the classified underlying record the whistleblower relied on. The HHS Secretary’s office holds whatever email traffic followed Becerra’s receipt of the file. The NIH holds the grant documentation bearing on the gain-of-function definition. None of those are public yet. What is public is the routing. A complaint went to the man with the most political reason to bury it. It went there instead of the office that could have answered the question. That office still has not.

Sources

  1. The DisInformation Chronicle – “Exclusive: Biden Administration Buried Intel Whistleblower Complaint Accusing Fauci of Lying to Congress” (Paul D. Thacker, 2026-06-19)
  2. DocumentCloud – Acting IC IG Tamara Johnson’s August 11, 2021 memo notifying DNI Avril Haines of the Fauci whistleblower complaint
  3. DocumentCloud – the attached whistleblower complaint letter
  4. DocumentCloud – ODNI general counsel follow-up identifying the specific Fauci statements at issue
  5. The Washington Times – “Tulsi Gabbard: Fauci lied to Congress, directed Wuhan research funding” (2026-06-19)
  6. The Federalist – “New Docs: Fauci Colluded With Intel Agencies On Covid Cover-Up, And Then Lied To Congress About It” (2026-06-19)
  7. BMJ – “Biden pardons Anthony Fauci and others to protect them from Trump retribution” (2025-01-27)