The Pardon Came First

Biden shielded Fauci before the public saw the evidence. This week, on her last day as DNI, Tulsi Gabbard released what the pardon was meant to bury.

On January 20, 2025, with a few hours left in his presidency, Joe Biden signed a preemptive pardon for Anthony Fauci. No charges. No indictment. No grand jury. Just a blanket shield against any federal offense stretching back to 2014, handed out before anyone in the public had seen a single piece of evidence against the man.

Stop and sit with that. You don’t pardon a man for nothing. You pardon him because you have a reasonable expectation that something is coming. The pardon was the tell. And this week, we found out what it was meant to bury.

On June 18, 2026, on her last day as Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard declassified and released hundreds of internal communications from inside the Intelligence Community. The release is titled, plainly, “Fauci Funded Wuhan Lab Research That Sparked COVID.” Read the documents yourself before anyone tells you what to think about them. They are posted on the ODNI site. That is the whole point of a maximum transparency mandate. You don’t need a pundit to interpret them for you.

Here is what the release alleges, and I am going to be careful to call these allegations, because that is what they are until a court or an inspector general says otherwise.

Fauci, as head of NIAID, directed millions in US taxpayer dollars toward dangerous coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The lab leak that ODNI now describes as the widely viewed source of the pandemic traces back to work he funded. Then, when the origin question became politically radioactive, Fauci did not step back. According to the released emails, he stepped in. He fed hand-picked, NIAID-funded scientists into the Intelligence Community as supposedly neutral experts. Their input shaped the official assessments. Those assessments were then cited publicly as scientific consensus to knock down the lab-leak theory. ODNI calls it a circular reporting loop. I call it laundering your own conclusion through the spy agencies and selling it back to the public as independent analysis.

It gets worse. ODNI says Fauci promoted a paper he helped prompt into existence, a paper they describe as fraudulent, and pushed it to the IC as legitimate evidence. Senior analysts, according to the documents, praised him not as the policymaker and grant-funder he was, but as an unbiased guide to the real coronavirus experts. The fox was not just in the henhouse. The fox was writing the security assessment on henhouse safety.

And the people inside who saw it for what it was got crushed. The release describes whistleblowers who challenged the origin conclusions and were marginalized, threatened with retaliation, and watched their careers stall. A contractor was terminated days after coming forward to ODNI. Managers reportedly reminded analysts that leadership decided who got promoted, and the analysts who pushed the lab-leak hypothesis could read the room. Senior leaders allegedly stripped the anonymity that the whistleblower process is supposed to guarantee by demanding managers or attorneys sit in on the complaint meetings. That is not oversight. That is intimidation with a government badge on it. Gabbard has referred these accounts to the Intelligence Community Inspector General.

Then there is the sworn testimony. On June 3, 2024, Fauci sat in front of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. He was asked, repeatedly, whether he ever spoke to the FBI, CIA, DIA, or any US intelligence agency about viral research. He dodged, and then he said the words, not to my knowledge about COVID. ODNI says the correspondence they just released directly contradicts that answer. If that holds up, it is not a gray area. Lying to Congress under oath is a felony. He called the cover-up accusations preposterous to the committee’s face.

Now go back to the pardon.

If none of this were true, Fauci would not have needed it. Innocent men do not require a blanket federal shield signed in the dark on the way out the door. The pardon does not prove guilt, and Biden’s own lawyers were careful to write that the pardon is not an acknowledgment that anyone did anything wrong. Fine. But a pardon is the most powerful tool a president has to make a problem disappear, and it was deployed on Fauci before the public had the evidence in hand. The sequence matters. They pardoned him first. The documents came second. You are supposed to never see step two.

Here is the part I want you to feel, not just process.

If these allegations are true, this is not a scandal in the ordinary Washington sense. It is not a bad news cycle. A pandemic killed more than a million Americans and millions more worldwide. It shuttered businesses, including a lot of yours. It put people in the ground alone, with families on the wrong side of a hospital window. If the man who helped fund the research that caused it then used the machinery of American intelligence to bury his own role, lied to Congress about it under oath, and got a preemptive pardon to walk away clean, then we are not talking about misconduct. We are talking about crimes against humanity dressed up as public health, with the cover-up engineered inside the agencies that are supposed to work for us.

I am a veteran. I took an oath to the Constitution, not to a man and not to an agency. The thing that should make every American’s blood run hot here is not partisan. It is structural. The Intelligence Community was turned into a public relations shop for one official’s reputation. Dissent was punished. Whistleblowers, the people the system depends on to catch exactly this kind of rot, were identified and squeezed. And the last move on the board was a pardon that put the whole thing beyond the reach of a courtroom.

So be angry. But be precise about it. The release is a set of allegations and declassified internal documents, not a verdict. Fauci has denied wrongdoing for years and is entitled to that defense. The lab-leak origin remains contested across the agencies, and honest people should say so. None of that lowers the temperature on what the documents describe, because the conduct does not require the origin to be proven beyond doubt. Manipulating intelligence, retaliating against whistleblowers, and lying to Congress are wrong on their own terms, whatever a future inquiry concludes about a wet market versus a lab.

Read the documents. Demand the inspector general finish the job. And remember the order of operations, because it tells you everything. The pardon came first.

Stay sharp.