On Thursday, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) told “Fox & Friends” he is convinced that Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), committed “perjury” in past testimony to Congress regarding COVID-19 research conducted in China. Paul also announced that he is pursuing an “official criminal referral” of Fauci.
“I don’t think there’s ever been a clearer case of perjury in the history of government testimony, and I don’t say that lightly,” Paul said. “He said adamantly that the government never funded this gain-of-function research. We now have the Government Accountability Office, the GAO, has admitted [sic] that the funding came from the NIH. We have the acting director [Lawrence] Tabak of the NIH, admitting it in writing that it came from the NIH.”
Fauci has been accused of lying to Congress before, but this may be different because, according to Paul, we now have a “smoking gun” that proves the perjury.
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“But now we have, really, the smoking gun, and that is Fauci in private saying the opposite of what he was saying in public when he was publicly telling me that absolutely we do not fund gain-of-function research in China,” Paul explained. “He says privately we are suspicious that the virus has been manipulated and we are suspicious because we know they are doing gain-of-function research. He then goes on to describe the research, and it’s exactly the research that the NIH funded.”
Paul warned Fauci last year that resigning as director of NIAID wouldn’t protect him. “Fauci’s resignation will not prevent a full-throated investigation into the origins of the pandemic,” he tweeted last year. “He will be asked to testify under oath regarding any discussions he participated in concerning the lab leak.”
But despite the smoking gun evidence, Paul says that prosecuting Fauci may be difficult because of the partisan justice system under the Biden administration.
“So he’s caught dead to rights here, but we have an incredibly partisan Attorney General [Merrick] Garland, who is refusing to act, so I’ve taken the extraordinary step of actually going to the local U.S. attorney in D.C. to see if he will act,” Paul said. “The problem is there are partisans littered throughout the legal system, and people are seeing this. You don’t get prosecuted if you’re a Democrat under this administration, no matter what you do.”
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) said back in March that House Republicans were building up a case against Fauci and mentioned the possibility of Congress issuing a criminal referral for Fauci’s prosecution. Jordan similarly doubted that the Biden Justice Department would act on it.
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