Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on her final day on the job declassified a several-hundred-page agency report on Dr. Anthony Fauci related to when he was director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the COVID-19 pandemic and the continuing, unresolved issue of the origin of the deadly virus. 

Gabbard said in a statement that Fauci and his allies in the scientific and intelligence communities ripped a page right out of “the deep state playbook,” to purportedly cover-up that the virus leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, in China. 

Gabbard’s task force sorted through the documents and heard testimony from whistleblowers who reported retaliation for challenging the narrative preferred by Fauci.

“The COVID-19 pandemic caused tremendous hardship and pain for millions of our fellow Americans and for countless people around the world. After years of lies, censorship, and cover-ups, the American people deserve transparency, truth, and accountability,” Gabbard said in a statement. 

One of the findings in the research documents shows that a March 2020 scientific paper titled “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2” that dismissed a lab origin as implausible and that Fauci influenced behind-the-scenes shaped the understanding of the National Intelligence Council, according to The Daily Caller.

Another finding is a whistleblower requested an investigation in by the intelligence community’s internal watchdog into Fauci possibly lying to Congress under questioning by GOP Sen. Rand Paul about the ties between his institute and research at the Wuhan lab, the Daily Caller also reports. 

Fauci had falsely claimed under oath that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases had never funded research at the Wuhan lab that met the definition of “gain-of-function” – research that attempts to find out how a virus would act if manipulated, which could also make them more infectious or deadly.

Despite Fauci’s influence on the IC at the country’s top biodefense official, the IC passed the buck to the inspector general at the Department of Health and Human Services, documents show.

It’s not clear that the health department’s watchdog, then under Biden HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, ever acted on that referral, also according to the Daily Caller.