Following up on a threat he made last week, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) sent an official criminal referral on Dr. Anthony Fauci to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), The Hill reported today.
Paul is asking Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate Fauci for allegedly lying to Congress when he said the National Institutes of Health (NIH) “has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
Last week, Paul asked Fauci if he wanted to retract the statement he made to Congress during a May 11 hearing. Paul said, “Dr. Fauci, knowing that it is a crime to lie to Congress, do you wish to retract your statement of May 11, where you claimed the NIH never funded gain-of-function research and move on?”
Fauci replied he would not retract the statement and was adamant that he has never lied before Congress.
“You do not know what you’re talking about, quite frankly, and I want to say that officially,” Fauci said. “You do not know what you’re talking about … If anybody is lying here, senator, it is you.”
According to the Washington Examiner, in his letter, Paul told Garland that a 2017 research paper on experiments carried out at the Wuhan lab referenced a grant from the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) — of which Fauci is the director.
Read the full article at The Defender.
Watch the heated exchange when Rand Paul gave Fauci a chance to ‘fess up’: