Sen. Rand Paul is preparing to conduct a transcribed interview with Anthony Fauci later this month, according to a congressional letter published Tuesday on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee website.
The interview sets up another confrontation between the Kentucky Republican and the former NIAID director, who clashed repeatedly during the COVID-19 pandemic over gain-of-function research and the virus’s origins.
“Please delete this e-mail after you read it.”
Sen. Gary Peters, the top Democrat on the committee, wrote the letter objecting to Paul’s plans, alleging the chairman “failed to give the Committee minority notice and opportunity to participate in your planned transcribed interview of Dr. Anthony Fauci later this month.”
Paul called on Fauci to testify before the committee in September 2025, citing emails in which Fauci allegedly directed his staff to delete official emails in violation of federal records retention law.
Fauci wrote to National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins, “Please delete this e-mail after you read it,” in the hours after a call with virologists to discuss a scientific paper dismissing the possibility of a lab leak in Wuhan.
Private emails and chats unearthed by the Freedom of Information Act and congressional subpoena later revealed the authors of the paper harbored private concerns that a lab accident had ignited the pandemic.
During the pandemic, Fauci denied under oath that his longtime institute, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, supported gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. NIAID supported a research project at the WIV that manipulated a coronavirus to generate up to 10,000 times the viral load of the original virus.
In May, the committee heard testimony from CIA whistleblower James Erdman III, who alleged Fauci influenced the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment of the origins of COVID by connecting spy agencies to favored scientists connected to NIAID or the WIV.
Former President Joe Biden signed a pardon for Fauci for unspecified crimes on Jan. 19, 2025, stretching back to Jan. 1, 2014.
