(Daily Signal)—Sen. Rand Paul said Tuesday the Justice Department’s refusing his requests for a perjury investigation into former federal health official Dr. Anthony Fauci is proof of a two-tiered justice system following a Senate hearing on the origins of COVID-19.
Paul, R-Ky., told The Daily Signal on Tuesday that it’s “disappointing” to see no action taken almost three years after he began demanding such a probe. His accusations stem from the former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director’s testimony to Congress about U.S.-funded virus research in China, a central topic of Tuesday’s hearing.
Fauci testified in May 2021 that his agency never funded risky “gain-of-function” experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but Paul has repeatedly highlighted records and emails suggesting otherwise.
“If you happened to walk in the Capitol on Jan. 6, [2021], you might get 10 years in prison,” Paul said. “But if you’re responsible for funding research that led to a pandemic and killed 15 million people, and then you lied about it to Congress, then nothing happens to you.”
Paul filed a criminal referral against Fauci in July 2021 and again in July 2023 over the perjury claims. The Kentucky lawmaker told The Daily Signal that the lack of a response from federal prosecutors indicates America has “two standards of justice.”
Paul added: “In some ways, I’m very disappointed, but it’s not that I don’t expect it.” The senator blamed President Joe Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, whom he said is “probably the most partisan attorney general in our history.”
Fauci did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Paul’s allegations.
Paul made the remarks shortly after virology experts testified to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. The committee’s four witnesses gave varying narratives on whether COVID-19 was the result of a Wuhan lab accident or if it arose naturally among animals.
Paul said in an opening statement that Fauci and his “inner circle” acknowledged the likelihood of a lab leak in private messages that were released through litigation. “Despite these private doubts, publicly, these so-called experts and their allies were dismissing the lab-leak theory as a conspiracy,” he said.
Paul also told The Daily Signal last month that Fauci “could be indicted” for deleting emails about COVID-19’s origins to circumvent public records law.
Fauci has claimed the U.S.-funded research suspected to have caused the leak, conducted through the EcoHealth Alliance, was not technically the “gain-of-function” research lawmakers have asked him about. He testified to a House panel earlier this month that the experiments didn’t fit “the regulatory and operative definition.”
That contradicted previous testimony from National Institutes of Health Principal Deputy Director Lawrence Tabak, who said Fauci’s agency did, in fact, fund gain-of-function experiments at the high-risk Wuhan lab before the COVID-19 pandemic.
Independent Journalism Is Dying
Ever since President Trump’s miraculous victory, we’ve heard an incessant drumbeat about how legacy media is dying. This is true. The people have awakened to the reality that they’re being lied to by the self-proclaimed “Arbiters of Truth” for the sake of political expediency, corporate self-protection, and globalist ambitions.
But even as independent journalism rises to fill the void left by legacy media, there is still a huge challenge. Those at the top of independent media like Joe Rogan, Dan Bongino, and Tucker Carlson are thriving and rightly so. They have earned their audience and the financial rewards that come from it. They’ve taken risks and worked hard to get to where they are.
For “the rest of us,” legacy media and their proxies are making it exceptionally difficult to survive, let alone thrive. They still have a stranglehold over the “fact checkers” who have a dramatic impact on readership and viewership. YouTube, Facebook, and Google still stifle us. The freer speech platforms like Rumble and 𝕏 can only reward so many of their popular content creators. For independent journalists on the outside looking in, our only recourse is to rely on affiliates and sponsors.
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Independent media is the future. In many ways, that future is already here. While the phrase, “the more the merrier,” does not apply to this business because there are still some bad actors in the independent media field, there are many great ones that do not get nearly enough attention. We hope to change that one content creator at a time.
Thank you and God Bless,
JD Rucker
