The text is a commentary for the American newspaper The Hill by Jay Rogers, a financial expert with over 30 years of experience in the fields of private equity, private lending, hedge funds and asset management. The author analyzes documents published by former US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, which, according to her, raise new questions about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, the role of Dr. Anthony Fauci and the actions of American institutions during the health crisis. The assessments and conclusions expressed are those of the author and reflect his interpretation of published material and political events in the United States.
On June 19, Tulsi Gabbard, a decorated Army veteran and former Democratic presidential candidate, used her last day as Director of National Intelligence to drop her latest bombshell.
Gabbard declassified hundreds of pages of communications and documents that suggest that Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, manipulated the intelligence community to misinform the public about COVID-19 and its origins.
The documents appear to support long-standing allegations that Fauci funded dangerous viral enhancement research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. During the COVID outbreak, he worked with politicized factions in the U.S. intelligence community to suppress evidence that the pandemic was the result of a lab leak. He allegedly lied about this under oath to Congress in 2024.
In announcing the declassification, Gabbard called it “years of lies, censorship, and cover-ups.” If she’s right, then this isn’t a political argument — it’s a crime scene.
The documents reveal that during a 90-day presidential review of the origins of COVID ordered by President Joe Biden in 2021, Fauci repeatedly directed intelligence analysts to his preferred experts, including co-authors of the “Proximal Origins” report, who argued in favor of a natural-animal origin. Internal emails show an official letter that "Dr. Fauci recommended that [the intelligence community] contact the individuals listed below" - those who co-authored that same report.
So the person whose institute funded the research under investigation also helped choose who would review it. That doesn't sound like expert judgment - it sounds more like a cover-up.
Intelligence analysts saw it. Senior analysts have flagged a deep institutional conflict of interest and have called Fauci a "strongly interested politician", not a neutral expert. They have rejected him as an external reviewer for the final assessment.
Meanwhile, biological weapons experts from Lawrence Livermore’s Z Division who identified a genetically similar precursor virus in Wuhan, supporting a finding of a lab leak, have been dismissed by the leadership of the National Intelligence Council.
Those who tried to expose it have reported retaliation. One contractor claims he was fired days after he said he had been fired. Analysts say they were reminded that promotions would follow their preferred conclusion.
Of course, the problem of trust in the intelligence community is not new, but part of a long-standing pattern. This is the same intelligence community ecosystem whose alumni recently interfered in an election, coordinating with the Biden campaign to mislabel Hunter Biden’s laptop as "Russian disinformation".
Fauci’s household net worth has roughly doubled during the pandemic, rising from $7.6 million in 2019 to $12.6 million by the end of 2021, according to financial disclosures from OpenTheBooks. His agency was part of a $710 million stream of royalty payments from pharmaceutical companies flowing to the NIH during the pandemic, including $400 million in catch-up royalties from Moderna alone in 2022. How much went, and to which scientists? NIH declined to comment.
New documents released by Gabbard outline Fauci’s research agenda as “linked to big pharma and the pursuit of trillion-dollar universal vaccines.” If a regulator profits from a crisis, controls the narrative about it, and shapes the intelligence assessment designed to explain it, the word for it is not “coincidence.” It’s “regulatory capture.”
On January 19, 2025, Biden issued a preemptive, full, and unconditional pardon for Fauci, signed with a fountain pen at 10:31 p.m. the night before Trump’s inauguration. Biden was not in the room when it was signed—the authorization went through a chain of emails from Chief of Staff Jeff Ziens. The 93-page House Oversight Committee report declared the automatic pardon invalid—lacking "written approval traceable to the president’s own consent." Former Attorney General Pam Bondi initiated a review.
The Schaefer Center at USC estimates the total economic cost of COVID at $14 trillion by 2023. More than 1.1 million Americans have died. The World Bank, UNESCO, and UNICEF have estimated that closing schools during the pandemic could cost today’s students up to $17 trillion in additional income over their lifetimes.
Churches were closed by government order. New and old businesses were destroyed by decree. Citizens were forced to wear masks and restricted by governors who simultaneously dined maskless in fancy indoor restaurants.
If any of this was based on suppressing the truth about the origins of the virus, the public must take responsibility—starting with the First Amendment violations that a federal court found in Missouri v. Biden when it concluded that the government had forced social media platforms to suppress protected free speech. The Fifth Circuit later upheld that ruling in part, before the Supreme Court overturned it in 2024 for lack of standing.
Fair Observations
Investigators will note that Gabbard’s release is not a conviction. Fauci denies any wrongdoing. The intelligence documents are vague. The issue of pen pardons remains truly unsettled by law.
These warnings are real. But at this point, the FBI, the Department of Energy, and the CIA have placed varying degrees of confidence in the conclusion of a lab leak. Years of pointed questioning by Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) - met with visible contempt at every hearing - now seem more prescient than paranoid.
The pardon was issued before any charges were filed, which is usually a wake-up call to reasonable minds. As Gordon Gekko noted in a different context, the most valuable resource is information. The American people still owe a great deal of it.