Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul has sent a criminal referral of Dr. Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden, to the Department of Justice for allegedly lying to Congress.
Sen. Paul had promised that he intended to do so during an appearance on Hannity last week.
“He’s lying about whether or not he funded gain-of-function research, and yes, he should be punished,” Paul said.
Prior to appearing on Fox News, Sen. Paul got into it with Fauci during a Senate hearing. He had accused Fauci of lying to Congress about whether the National Institutes of Health funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Paul sent a criminal referral to Attorney General Merrick Garland on Wednesday, according to a report from the Washington Examiner.
“I write to urge the United States Department of Justice to open an investigation into testimony made to the United States Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions by Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, on May 11, 2021,” Paul wrote in the letter.
The National Institutes of Health has denied they funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab, but they appear to be playing semantics as Sen. Paul has pointed out that what they have funded certainly “fits the definition of gain-of-function research.”
In the letter, Paul reportedly pointed to a 2017 paper on Shi’s experiments at the Wuhan lab “in which the spike genes from two uncharacterized bat SARS-related coronavirus strains, Rs4231 and Rs7327, were combined with the genomic backbone of another SARS-related coronavirus to create novel chimeric SARS-related viruses” and that “these experiments combined genetic information from different SARS-related coronaviruses and combined them to create novel, artificial viruses able to infect human cells.”
Paul has now asked Garland to review whether Fauci has violated 18 U.S.C. § 1001, which makes it a crime to, during the course of “any investigation or review” conducted by Congress, make “any materially false, fictions, or fraudulent statement or representation,” according to a report from The Blaze.
“I ask that you investigate whether Dr. Fauci’s statements to Congress on May 11, 2021 violated this statute or any other,” Paul said.
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