Thank you, Tulsi Gabbard: In with a Bang, Out with a Bang

Unfriendly fire

Just as she was on the way out the door as director of national intelligence this month, Tulsi Gabbard dropped several major bombshells.

First, she declassified records detailing the existence of biolabs in Ukraine and elsewhere, just as she said there were years ago, and followed that with records she says show that Anthony Fauci funded dangerous gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Gabbard came into office with heavy fire all around her—accused of Russian sympathies and criticized for her defense of Edward Snowden—and she left in much the same way, only now she was the one lighting up the sky like the Fourth of July.

Or at least the sky should have been lit up, which gets to one of the reasons I’m writing this piece. Unlike when Gabbard took office, when the media served as rocket launchers for her critics, the corporate media completely ignored these latest document releases. Those now unsealed records expose extensive government gaslighting the public needs to know about, and, more, they underscore not only the need for reform but the imperative that we never forget.

The first trove detailed U.S. support for laboratories that worked with deadly pathogens. The second, issued on her last day in office, described communications and documents that Gabbard said exposed how Fauci worked with politicized career leadership in the Intelligence Community (IC) to suppress the truth about his actions, the virus’s lab-leak origins, and his role in directing U.S. funding for the research.

The newly declassified material is important not because it tells us anything we didn’t already know. It does not. It matters because it could lead to criminal probes—U.S. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) sure hopes it does—but, even if it doesn’t, it demonstrates that the questions Gabbard asked and was demonized for deserved to be asked after all. For years, the mere suggestion that the United States funded biological laboratories in Ukraine or overseas was routinely lumped together with claims about secret bioweapons programs and dismissed as conspiracy theory.

Biden administration officials, liberal commentators, and progressive fact-checkers (a redundancy, I know) often treated the subject as settled. Officials and media commentators portrayed people who persisted in asking questions as spreaders of disinformation or parroting Russian propaganda, including Gabbard.

Now the government itself has confirmed much of what skeptics were told could not possibly be true. Specifically, the newly declassified material states that the United States supported more than 40 laboratories in Ukraine—120 biolabs in all in more than 30 countries—through various Cooperative Threat Reduction programs, identifying facilities that worked with pathogens including anthrax, tularemia, tuberculosis, Swine Fever, Newcastle disease, MERS, SARS, plague, Ebola, Marburg, and other dangerous organisms.

The documents describe U.S. funding, training, and biosafety programs and acknowledge intelligence concerns that some laboratories could be vulnerable to Russian seizure or attack during the war. Here’s an example:

“As of the early 2010s, IECVM (Institute of Experimental and Clinical Veterinary Medicine) held hundreds of pathogens and was one of over forty Ukrainian-owned and operated laboratories that received assistance under DOD’s [Department of Defense] Biological Threat Reduction Program, according to publicly available information and [redacted] reporting,” the intelligence assessment stated. “Although the facility had updated some areas with modern equipment and infrastructure, IECVM, as recently as 2019 had at least some biosafety and biosecurity deficiencies—most notably in rooms handling contagious Brucella bacteria…”

That’s not all the slides document. The Central Reference Laboratory at the Ukrainian Research Anti-Plague Institute in Odesa received more than $3.4 million in U.S. funding for construction, equipment, and furniture, while the Institute of Veterinary Medicine of the National Academy of Agrarian Sciences got $2.1 million. The Kherson Diagnostic laboratory received more than $1.7 million, and the Zakarpartska laboratory hauled in more than $1.9 million.

And then there was the scope of who was involved: The World Health Organization, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the CDC, the Joint Genome Institute, and a string of U.S. universities.

The Media: No News Today

As Gabbard leaves office, these are the actual assessments from our national intelligence agencies. Those are serious assessments, and quite damaging to the federal government, and yet, excepting Fox and conservative news sites, I have been unable to find a standalone news report devoted to Gabbard’s release of the declassified biolab or Fauci documents anywhere in the corporate media, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, NPR, Reuters, or the Associated Press. Perhaps I missed one but in any case the coverage—or the lack thereof—is a far cry from 2022 when major news organizations devoted substantial attention to her remarks, often portraying them as echoing Russian disinformation and little more than science fiction.

Actually, there was an egregious campaign of gaslighting. On the one hand, now that Gabbard has released the dry goods, the deep state is saying, “Yeah, yeah, but everybody knew about those labs all along.”

To be sure, we did. That’s because in 2022, then-under secretary of state Victoria Nuland slipped up in a congressional hearing and said something she was not supposed to, after then Sen. Marco Rubio asked: “Does Ukraine have chemical or biological weapons?”

Oh, sure, Nuland replied, and then acknowledged that the United States was concerned about Russian forces obtaining research materials housed there:

“Ukraine has biological research facilities which, in fact, we are now quite concerned Russian troops, Russian forces, may be seeking to gain control of, so we are working with the Ukrainians on how they can prevent any of those research materials from falling into the hands of Russian forces should they approach.”

The difference between Nuland’s statement and Gabbard’s was simple: there wasn’t one.

Still, on the one hand, the corporate press was busy burying Nuland’s confession—though it circulated in independent media—while the Biden administration was busy with its gaslighting operation, twisting Gabbard’s almost identical words to insinuate that she was saying there were bioweapons labs—something she never did.

So the U.S. government was lying on both ends of the street.

They buried the fact that U.S.-funded biolabs existed. Then they accused anyone who questioned their narrative of claiming Ukraine housed biological weapons labs—a claim they could plausibly deny because critics like Gabbard had never made it.

Speaking recently to The National News Desk’s Jan Jeffcoat, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) clarified succinctly what was going on:

The other argument being made, Paul said, is that the labs were for benign purposes: agricultural research, animal viruses, and the like:

And yet that gain-of-function research is quite likely exactly what they were doing, and in a war zone, no less. The research may have started before the war, but the lack of transparency and the inability to reveal the truth when the war did start—except for Nuland’s slip-up—shows just how careless the Biden administration was.

“Despite the obvious potential for catastrophic global impact research on dangerous pathogens in biolabs can have, politicians, so-called health professionals like Dr. Fauci, and entities within the Biden administration’s national security team lied to the American people about the existence of U.S.-funded and supported biolabs, and threatened those who attempted to expose the truth,” Gabbard said.

“ODNI will continue to work closely with partners across the government to identify where these labs are, what pathogens they contain, and to end dangerous gain-of-function research that threatens the health and well-being of the American people and people around the world.”

Quite the opposite of what the Biden administration was doing.

For his part, Paul said it’s unconscionable that the government was dishonest, but the lengths they went to hide the trail and to protect the labs was even worse.

“It’s not surprising to me that the government lied,” he said in the interview. “… And some of the research we believe is farmed out to third-world countries and other countries because they know it’s dangerous and they know we would object if we discovered it on our soil. So they’re actually taking it to foreign countries to do dangerous research because they think there’ll be less objection. Sometimes the foreign countries will take it simply because we pay for it and the money. But why would we be doing this? Why would we be funding these labs all over the world? It’s a terrible thing. And I’m glad that Tulsi Gabbard has declassified this.”

Just as Gabbard intimated, Paul said Congress was not done with the matter: “We’re going to go lab by lab, and we’re going to expose the individual pathogens that they’re using, and the danger.”

Worth 15 million lives?

If the biolab disclosures revisit an old controversy, the Fauci documents could prove even more consequential. According to Gabbard, the newly declassified material exposes his direct role in shaping intelligence assessments and contradicts testimony he later gave under oath before Congress.

Gabbard says ODNI officials gathered testimony from multiple IC whistleblowers who reported retaliation for challenging the IC’s manipulation of intelligence on the virus’s origins, which she said unveiled a clear pattern of suppressing dissent, silencing critics, and burying evidence that undermined IC integrity.

Then, too, Gabbard says, Fauci’s close IC relationships enabled him to assume three key roles during the pandemic, shielding him from scrutiny as he wielded outsized influence. Among other roles, Gabbard said, Fauci funded risky coronavirus research linked to big pharma and the pursuit of “universal vaccines” worth trillions of dollars, all while becoming the nation’s pandemic “pundit” and publicly pushing lies, disinformation, and censorship.

“The COVID-19 pandemic caused tremendous hardship and pain for millions of our fellow Americans and for countless people around the world,” she said when releasing the documents.

In his National News Desk interview, Paul dug deeper into the specifics of Fauci’s alleged misconduct.

“He was an advocate for gain-of-function research,” he said. “He wrote op-eds about it. In fact, he said in a 2010 Washington Post article, even if a pandemic occurs, the knowledge is worth the risk. Well, 15 million people who died under Covid may not agree with that.”

Paul said Fauci even kept twisting the definition of gain-of-function research—sort of like how Fauci and his colleagues in the government changed the definition of a vaccine to cover the experimental Covid injections.

“Anthony Fauci's definition, which he kept changing, he changed the definition one time, right before a committee hearing I had with him, he changed the definition,” Paul said.

Throughout the pandemic, Gabbard also alleges, Fauci and politicized leaders within the IC created a self-serving circular reporting loop.

“He provided hand-picked NIAID-funded scientists to advise the IC,” ODNI found.

What’s more, Gabbard said the newly released correspondence directly contradicted Fauci’s 2024 testimony to the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.

“In that hearing, while under oath, Fauci was repeatedly asked whether he spoke to ‘FBI, CIA, DIA or any U.S. intelligence agency concerning viral research’ before, during, or after the pandemic,” ODNI stated. “Fauci repeatedly dodged the questions, before falsely stating, ‘not to my knowledge about Covid.’”

Gabbard also pointed to testimony from multiple whistleblowers who revealed that intelligence analysts who challenged Fauci’s Covid-origin conclusions faced threat of retaliation, were marginalized, and often suffered career setbacks: “This silenced dissent and fostered a culture where truth was sacrificed to conformity and credible evidence was buried.”

And the director brought the receipts: A contractor was terminated just days after coming forward to ODNI as a whistleblower, while managers reminded analysts who advocated for the lab-leak hypothesis that leadership would determine which analysts would be promoted, ODNI stated: “Senior leaders also allegedly set up roadblocks for whistleblowers, removing anonymity from the complaint process by insisting managers or attorneys be present at ODNI meetings, creating an atmosphere of intimidation.”

The message was clear: disagreement with the manipulated finding would derail careers, ODNI asserts.

Gain-of-Prison?

And so we get to the third important point about Gabbard’s long and ferocious goodbye—the fact that Fauci should be held accountable.

Paul would like to challenge his pardon and see Fauci indicted.

“We’ve never had a pardon that’s gone to court that was granted for an unspecified crime,” he said. “So he’s been pardoned for any crime he might have committed over a ten-year period. He’s never been charged with a crime. So, how do you pardon someone in advance of a charge and for any crime they might be charged with over a ten-year period? That’s way too broad. If you didn’t specifically pardon him for something, he’s not pardoned.”

Paul said he believed Fauci was guilty of serious crimes.

“He’s guilty of lying to Congress on gain of function, but he’s also guilty of destroying records,” he said. “That was an open and shut case. He not only destroyed records, but he would send emails to others and say, when you read this destroy it. So he’s guilty of multiple crimes, and someone needs to have the guts to indict him. He needs to be investigated mainly because he is the paragon of an example of a guy who funded research so dangerous that it may well have led to the deaths of 15 million people.”

Precisely. There must be accountability, and there must be reform. Whatever one’s view of Tulsi Gabbard or Anthony Fauci, the public deserves a full accounting of what happened and safeguards to ensure it never happens again. Paul is specifically calling for formal oversight of biolabs, for one thing.

“So what I’m proposing is a presidential commission with scientists to review all research from here forward and to scrutinize whether or not it is gain of function and try to stop it before it happens,” he said. “But this includes all the biolabs overseas. All that research needs to be scrutinized by someone who is objective.”

Then too, while it may seem like old news to keep pounding away at the obvious dishonesty and tyranny of the Biden administration, the misconduct, not just individually but by the left in toto, must never be forgotten.

The pandemic years were excruciating for all of us. Many were discriminated against and effectively canceled from society for simply exercising their constitutional rights. People lost jobs, families, friends. The government hurled the most heinous accusations against its own citizens: a pandemic of the unvaccinated. The government banned travel and told most of the nation that they were nonessential. They told them they could not worship, but that they were ‘free’ to visit liquor stores. In short, we were free to do what the government allowed us to do, and nothing more. We were dehumanized and effectively imprisoned.

That we will always fight for our humanity and liberty must be our rallying cry. So thank you, Tulsi Gabbard, for offering up an important reminder, not to mention an actionable one.

We shall never forget.