President-elect Joe Biden chooses Xavier Becerra (left) for Secretary of Health and Human Services and Anthony Fauci (right) as his chief medical adviser on the Covid virus. (Credit: Reuters)
California Democrats just handed their gubernatorial nomination to a man whose pandemic-era résumé includes a role the party would prefer voters never examine: he was the place where the truth about COVID-19’s origins was sent to be quietly buried.
That is the picture that emerges from the trove of records Tulsi Gabbard declassified on her way out the door as Director of National Intelligence. Among the documents her office released on June 18 is correspondence describing how a whistleblower complaint, one alleging that the Intelligence Community believed COVID escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and that Dr. Anthony Fauci had misled Congress about it, was routed away from an independent watchdog and onto the desk of then-Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, the very official to whom Fauci answered.
An August 19, 2021 letter from ODNI General Counsel Chris Fonzone to Gabbard’s Biden-era predecessor, Avril Haines, lays out the maneuver in the bloodless prose of government memos. Reviewers concluded the complaint concerned exchanges between Fauci and Sen. Rand Paul, in which Fauci had insisted, under direct questioning, that “the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain of function research in the Wuhan Institute.”
Paul gave him the chance to retract it. He refused. Then came the decisive sentence in the Fonzone memo.
We’ve thus updated the draft letter to note this point and to refer the complaint to Secretary Becerra, rather than the HHS IG.
Strip away the passive voice and the meaning is unmistakable. A complaint accusing Fauci of lying to the Senate was not handed to the HHS Inspector General, the office built to investigate precisely that kind of allegation. It was handed to Fauci’s own boss. The watchdog was bypassed in favor of the man with every institutional incentive to make the problem disappear.
And disappear it did. Whatever passed for Becerra’s review of the matter produced no reckoning for Fauci. It generated instead the debarment of EcoHealth Alliance and its president, Peter Daszak, the conduit through which NIH money reached the Wuhan lab. Daszak was cut off from federal funding for five years. He was the offering. Fauci, by contrast, walked away untouched, having later collected a preemptive pardon signed by Joe Biden’s autopen against any future liability.
Had that whistleblower been allowed to testify, the entire arc of the COVID story might have bent in a different direction, toward accountability rather than the years of credentialed obfuscation Americans were instead asked to swallow. The implications would have reached well beyond one bureaucrat’s reputation, touching the question of what Washington knew about a Chinese laboratory and when it knew it. Instead, the inconvenient account went to Becerra’s office and was never heard from again. (Read more: TruthBasedMedia, 6/20/2026) (Archive)
From the first week of the pandemic in January of 2020, to the end of the pandemic in 2023, Fauci consistently pushed the wet market theory and shot down the lab leak theory. pic.twitter.com/ScRl3NlkHd
— MAZE (@mazemoore) June 19, 2026