CIA whistleblower says Anthony Fauci intentionally influenced the intelligence community’s conclusions about Covid origin

By Annette Gartland on May 14, 2026

This article has been updated.

A Central Intelligence Agency whistleblower has alleged in a US Senate hearing that the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Anthony Fauci, intentionally influenced the intelligence community’s analysis of the possible origin of SARS-CoV-2.

Senior CIA operations officer James Erdman III told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee yesterday (May 13): “Dr Fauci’s role in a cover-up was intentional. Dr Fauci influenced the analytical process and findings by leveraging his position to ensure the IC [intelligence community] consulted with a conflicted list of curated subject-matter experts, public health officials, and scientists.

“This included some of the authors of the paper ‘The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2’ and other public health experts who had been in his [Fauci’s] orbit for the last twenty-plus years.”

The CIA didn’t comply with lawful oversight during the Director’s Initiatives Group’s (DIG’s) investigation, analytical CIA standards were violated, and the CIA illegally monitored the computer and phone usage of DIG personnel, their investigations, and contact with whistleblowers, Erdman said.

Erdman (pictured left) was on joint duty assignment at the DIG between March 2025 and April 2026 and was responsible for leading the DIG’s investigation into Covid origins.

Intelligence community leaders and senior analysts downplayed the possibility that the Covid pandemic originated as a result of a lab incident, he said during yesterday’s hearing.

Erdman said that Fauci’s influence over the IC’s Covid-origin analysis and the “witting and unwitting role some BSEG [Biological Sciences Experts Group] scientists and IC personnel played in the cover-up” exposed why this issue was of deep concern.

He said there was documentation showing that, as of August 12, 2021, the CIA was considering describing the Covid origin as a lab leak, but this changed five days later.

“Unfortunately, because the CIA would not provide us documentation that we asked for, we have no idea why that changed,” Erdman told yesterday’s hearing.

By August 17, 2021, the CIA was saying that it had come to a “neutral” verdict on the origin of Covid-19.

Prior to this, six out of seven members of the CIA’s Covid Discovery Team had concluded with “low confidence” that Covid-19 originated from a lab in Wuhan, China.

“Following the CIA’s Covid relook that culminated in 2023, the CIA retaliated against analysts supporting the lab leak hypothesis,” Erdman told senators yesterday.

He said the analysts who supported the 2023 lab leak conclusion “took every administrative measure available to them to address their deep concerns regarding the analytic integrity of their finished intelligence”.

He added: “CIA managers retaliated against them for their refusal to agree with management’s middle-of-the-night anonymous rewrite of the analysis, which changed the assessment to a non-call judgement.”

After a review, the CIA changed its position in January 2025.

A CIA spokesman said on January 25, 2025: “CIA assesses with low confidence that a research-related origin of the Covid-19 pandemic is more likely than a natural origin based on the available body of reporting.

“CIA continues to assess that both research-related and natural-origin scenarios of the Covid-19 pandemic remain plausible.”

Erdman told yesterday’s hearing that a national security crisis had been caused by an inability to provide real oversight.

“Failure to address the United States government’s inability to differentiate between public health and biodefense and the oversight-resistant ecosystem of life science actors has been fertile ground for increasingly dangerous continental United States gain-of-function research, as well as similar research conducted in US-government-supported labs abroad,” he said.

Fauci’s pardon

Fauci was the US president’s chief medical adviser from 2021 to 2022 and the director of NIAID from 1984 to 2022. Yesterday’s hearing ignited further calls for his indictment.

However, on January 19, 2025, just before his presidency ended, Joe Biden issued a pre-emptive pardon to Fauci.

This was a full and unconditional pardon “for any offenses against the United States” that Fauci may have committed or taken part in from January 1, 2014, to the date of the pardon, “arising from or in any manner related to his service as Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force or the White House COVID-19 Response Team, or as Chief Medical Advisor to the President”.

Senator Rand Paul, who chaired yesterday’s hearing, said in an interview that he thought it was worth challenging the pardon.

“I’ve been arguing with the Trump DOJ that he [Fauci} should have been indicted,” he said. “This week passes the statute of limitations for his testimony with me the first time, but he testified a month or two later and said the same thing, that he never funded gain-of-function research.

“I think he’s still liable for that, but it’s also within the statute of limitations for destroying records and advising others to destroy records. We have evidence of that as well.”

Paul noted that such a pardon had never been challenged in court. This, he said, was a case in which the pardon was given for a ten-year period of time with no crime specified.

“It’s kind of hard to imagine a pardon so broad that encompasses any crime, so I think it could be challenged in court.” he said.

Paul, who has been in numerous head-to-head confrontations with Fauci in Congress, said he had recommended such action to the Biden Department of Justice (DOJ), which, he said, ignored his recommendation, and to the Trump DOJ, which had also largely ignored the recommendation.

Rand Paul (left) and Anthony Fauci.

Indictment of David Morens

Calls for Fauci’s indictment increased after the indictment of NIAID employee David M. Morens on April 28 this year for his alleged role in a scheme to evade Freedom of Information Act requests related to Covid-19 research grants.

Morens is charged with conspiracy against the United States; destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in federal investigations; concealment, removal, or mutilation of records; and aiding and abetting.

He served as a senior adviser in NIAID’s Office of the Director from 2006 to 2022.

David Morens

Reactions to Morens’ indictment varied. There are those who see this as proof that the dominoes have started to fall and more indictments will follow while some think that Morens (pictured left) may be the fall guy for others higher up in the echelons.

Rand Paul said yesterday that he believed that Morens had more information regarding Anthony Fauci. “I look forward to seeing if he may be more cooperative as a witness now that he faces this indictment,” Paul said in an interview.

He tweeted: “Dr. Fauci approved the research in Wuhan. He had every reason to make sure the conclusion about the origins of COVID was NOT a lab leak. So he injected himself into the intelligence community’s analysis. The conflict of interest could not be more obvious.”

Paul said in an interview with Fox News earlier this month that, during a congressional hearing before the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic on June 3, 2024, Fauci had thrown Morens “under the bus” and acted as if he’d hardly ever met him.

Morens had written in an email about a “secret back channel” that he said he would use to communicate with Fauci outside the public eye.

He stated in one email that he sent to the former director of the EcoHealth Alliance (EHA), Peter Daszak: “I can either send stuff to Tony on his private gmail, or hand it to him at work … He is too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble.”

Fauci said he knew nothing of Morens’ actions in assisting Peter Daszak and the EHA “or his conducting NIH business on his personal e-mail account or deleting emails to avoid FOIAs”.

He said during the congressional hearing: “What you saw, I believe, with Dr Morens was an aberrancy and an outlier.”

The US justice department has said that, according to the indictment against Morens, “Morens, Co-Conspirator 1, Co-Conspirator 2, and others conspired during the Covid-19 pandemic to defraud and commit several offenses against the United States after NIH terminated Co-Conspirator 1’s grant”.

‘Company 1’ refers to the EHA and ‘Co-Conspirator 1’ is taken to refer to Peter Daszak.

Fauci denied purposely using his private email address for official business. He told the congressional hearing: “Let me state for the record that, to the best of my knowledge, I have never conducted official business using my personal email.”

At one stage in the hearing Fauci contradicted himself. He stated that Morens had acted inappropriately, but then said he didn’t know exactly what Morens was doing.

US acting attorney-general Todd Blanche said of Morens’ indictment: “These allegations represent a profound abuse of trust at a time when the American people needed it most – during the height of a global pandemic.

“As alleged in the indictment, Dr Morens and his co-conspirators deliberately concealed information and falsified records in an effort to suppress alternative theories regarding the origins of Covid-19.”

Objections from Democrats and a CIA spokeswoman

Yesterday’s Senate hearing was boycotted by Democrat senators, who claimed the proceedings were “political theatre”.

The Director of Congressional and Public Affairs at the CIA, Liz Lyons, tweeted yesterday. “The Committee acted in bad faith by subpoenaing an Agency officer for testimony today without notifying CIA, despite having already obtained closed-door testimony from the individual previously.

“The witness testifying today is not appearing as a whistleblower in pursuit of the truth, but instead in response to the subpoena issued by Chairman Paul. This proceeding amounts to nothing more than dishonest political theater masquerading as a congressional hearing. As the CIA has already assessed, COVID-19 most likely originated from a lab leak, and efforts to undermine that conclusion are disingenuous.”

Senator Mike Lee tweeted: “With all due respect, no federal agency—not even the CIA—gets to tell the Senate what questions it may ask in a duly convened legislative hearing.

“The CIA is facing serious accusations, and telling the Senate it can’t look into these issues only heightens legitimate suspicions.

”@CIADirector needs to appear before the Senate immediately to respond in public to these and other serious accusations about the agency he’s leading.”

Feds For Freedom tweeted: “We’re all wondering…will the @CIA use bureaucratic processes and alleged secrecy requirements to undermine Jim Erdman’s testimony and obfuscate the truth?”

Links

A recording of the full hearing is available here.

Erdman’s written testimony can be accessed here, attached to a letter from Senators Rand Paul and Ron Johnson to CIA director John Ratcliffe, in which they write: “This letter serves as formal notice that we expect no retaliatory action of any kind to be taken against Mr. Erdman in connection with his appearance before the Committee.”

In his written testimony, Erdman goes into detail about the complaints some CIA analysts made about the changes to the draft CIA assessment of the possible origin of SARS-CoV-2 that were made in the middle of the night (1.53 a.m.).

“Two of the analysts made complaints to the ombudsman for analytic integrity,” Erdman wrote.

“The seniormost analyst/SME [Subject Matter Expert] wrote an email specifically addressing their disagreement over the changed assessment and asked that it be sent directly to WCPMC FO [the front office of the CIA’s Weapons and Counterproliferation Mission Center].

“Management at WCPMC did send it to the WCPMC FO, but not before adding their commentary to the notification.”

Erdman added: “The author of the email also refused to participate in any further COVID analysis; that individual was worried that policy makers were being misinformed.

“The CIA retaliated against (these) analysts who assessed lab leak. They no longer serve as analysts in WCPMC, their careers have been impacted, while those managers have been promoted into very senior positions. One of whom was promoted to senior intelligence service just this last year.”

Erdman further states that the analysts who assessed lab leak were given a $1,500 “exceptional performance award”. He says that, in contrast, “at least one non-specialist in favour of zoonosis according to documents held at the DNI, was awarded four times that amount”.

He said that, going forward, it would be very important that any awards for Covid analysis between 2020 and 2024 be scrutinised to see if there was a pattern of rewarding one side of the Covid argument preferentially.

A transcript of the Select Subcommittee hearing held on July 11, 2023, to examine the drafting, publication, and critical reception of ‘The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV–2’ is available here.

The document was published as correspondence to the editor of Nature Medicine on March 17, 2020.

‘Proximal Origin’ came to two primary conclusions: that Covid–19 was not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus and that no type of laboratory-based scenario for the origin of SARS-CoV-2 was plausible.