US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard dropped a bombshell the day before leaving her post, releasing classified documents and communications that she said reveal a direct role played by retired physician Anthony Fauci in misleading the White House — by influencing intelligence assessments on the origins of the coronavirus and in discussions related to funding virus research at China's Wuhan laboratory.
Gabbard said on platform X that the documents reveal that Fauci, who headed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, funded gain-of-function virus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology with millions of dollars of American taxpayer money. That institute is widely regarded as the source of the virus leak that caused the Covid-19 pandemic.
She disclosed declassified documents and communications that she said shed light on Fauci's role in funding dangerous research at the Wuhan laboratory and his subsequent complicity in suppressing facts that support the lab-leak hypothesis as the origin of Covid-19.
According to a statement from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Fauci was connected to US-funded research on bat coronaviruses in Wuhan.
Gabbard accused Fauci of working with what she described as "politicised elements within the US intelligence community to suppress information related to the origins of the virus and to conceal dimensions connected to the lab-leak hypothesis."