Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) amplified his efforts today to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci accountable for “lying to Congress” about gain-of-function research, with a crucial hearing before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
In an X post from May 12, Fox News Congressional correspondent Bill Melugin stated that Paul informed him “the COVID-19 whistleblower who will testify publicly [and] in person before his committee tomorrow morning is an active CIA employee.”
Although Melugin was not given a name, today’s hearing identified James Erdman III as the whistleblower. Erdman serves as a CIA Senior Operations Officer and a Co-Founder of Feds For Freedom. Notably, the organization’s mission revolves around “holding our government accountable.”
This morning, Paul’s Senate hearing aimed to accomplish precisely that, as stated in a press release from Feds For Freedom, by “exposing the CIA’s deliberate suppression of the COVID-19 lab leak origin and the ongoing weaponization of the intelligence community against the American public.”
At 10 AM, Paul commenced the Senate hearing by stating, “For years, Americans were told to trust the experts, trust the agencies, trust the intelligence community, and trust the officials who assured us that they were following the science. But the evidence before the committee tells a very different story.”
He outlined a system in which a select group of officials, scientists, grant recipients, and intelligence advisors shifted between different agencies, meetings, and briefings. They assessed one another’s work, swayed each other’s conclusions, and subsequently presented these results to Congress and the public as though they had been developed independently.
“Only it was not independent; it was a circle, Paul explained. Essentially, he explained that the intelligence community compensates researchers to analyze studies and produce reports. He mentioned that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) provides funding for their grants, the CIA seeks their expertise and grants them access to classified data, and the National Academies are responsible for publishing their findings. Policy makers then cite the result as a consensus, and “at the center of the government side of this circle was Dr. Anthony Fauci.”
“For years,” he said, “Dr. Fauci was not merely a public health official speaking from the NIH. He had a long-standing relationship with the National Security and Intelligence apparatus on biological threats, dangerous pathogens, classified life sciences researches, pandemic preparedness, and COVID origins.”
Repeatedly, Paul said, documents reveal Fauci’s involvement in national security discussions that extended well beyond typical public health communication. During the COVID crisis, intelligence officials arranged for Dr. Fauci to review highly classified intelligence assessments that were restricted from being shared outside the White House compound.