Fauci called back before Congress after his requests to ‘delete’ government emails uncovered by Sen. Paul

WASHINGTON — Dr. Anthony Fauci has been asked to return to Congress to answer questions about emails uncovered by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) showing the former White House COVID-19 czar asking colleagues to “delete” messages, according to copies obtained by The Post.

Fauci, who helmed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for decades, in two email chains asked other public health officials — including then-National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins — to send his emails to the trash bin after reading them.

One of the communications from Feb. 2, 2020, revealed the ex-NIAID head imploring Collins to “Please delete this e-mail after you read it” — a request that followed an all-hands-on-deck Feb. 1, 2020, conference call with top NIH officials about the rapidly spreading pandemic from Wuhan, China.

In one section of the email thread that month, British medical researcher Jeremy Farrar cautioned it was “Critical that responsible, respected scientists and agencies get ahead of the science and the narrative of this and are not reacting to reports which could be very damaging.”

The request and the preceding call prompted a now-infamous scientific paper, titled “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” published the following month, that dismissed the so-called “lab leak theory” of the origin of COVID-19, a GOP-led committee investigation previously uncovered.

Fauci claimed he did not know who authored the paper when discussing it with members of the press in April 2020 — despite having helped edit it — and the same month also described the lab leak theory as a “shiny object that will go away.”

Another missive on July 20, 2020, obtained by Paul showed Fauci asking one of his deputies, Greg Folkers, to “please delete this e-mail after you read it.”

The latter exchange centered on a tweet from Paul criticizing Fauci for having praised New York’s approach to COVID mitigation when compared to Florida or other countries like Italy, Spain and the UK.

Another of his senior advisers, Dr. David Morens, was investigated last year for discussing ways to evade Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests — including those about US taxpayer-funded grants to the Wuhan Institute of Virology — and candidly mentioning he had helped his boss to do the same through a “secret back channel,” according to emails first reported by The Post.

During his testimony to a House subcommittee last year, Fauci said three times that he had never deleted official government records.

“Dr. Fauci, did you ever delete an official record?” asked House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.), to which the former NIAID director answered: “No.”

Paul claimed in a Sept. 9 letter to Fauci that the emails prove the public health official “directed” employees at NIH “to destroy federal records.”

“I have reason to believe that you may be in possession of additional records related to the Committee’s
ongoing investigation,” the chairman of the Senate Homeland Committee also said.

“These records are necessary for the Committee to fully understand the federal government’s actions to identify the origins of COVID-19, and the extent to which taxpayer dollars were used to conduct risky virological research, as well as to weigh potential legislative reforms.”

Last July, a taxpayer watchdog group also alleged that Fauci had improperly communicated on a private email account with a Washington Post journalist to tamp down a public-relations firestorm over potentially painful research he approved on beagle puppies.

His attorney said the exchange with the reporter “involved a personal matter and not a matter related to government business,” denying that it violated federal record-keeping laws.

Paul — who previously referred Fauci for federal prosecution based on lying to Congress about the Wuhan grants for gain-of-function research on coronaviruses — has demanded a trove of emails, text messages and other communications from Fauci between 2018 and 2023 as part of his panel’s ongoing probe.

The Republican senator also requested an interview date be set sometime between Oct. 28 and Dec. 11 of this year.

Reps for Georgetown University’s Global Health Institute, where Fauci serves as a distinguished professor, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Neither did attorneys who represented the ex-NIAID official before his testimony to the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.