Purely Political: Rand Paul (Part II)

by Jim Buckley

Dr. Fauci Was Complicit in Covid-19 Gain-of-Function Research

Last week, we reported that Kentucky Senator Rand Paul’s efforts to ascertain exactly who and what brought about the Covid-19 pandemic have been vigorously resisted by the Biden administration. Senator Paul’s committee has received 250-page transcripts that have been completely redacted – every page blacked out – and many if not most FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests are and have been simply ignored.

So, during a short interview with the Senator after his recent talk at the Reagan Ranch Center, I pursued this line of questioning:

Q. It disturbs me, Senator Paul, that you are a senator, one of only a hundred in a nation of some 330 million people, yet when you try to retrieve documents from a government agency, using the Freedom of Information Act, what you receive are two 250-page documents completely redacted. Every page of blacked out. If that’s it, if that’s all you – a U.S. Senator – can get from a governmental organization you ostensibly oversee, what’s the likelihood of any of us trying to get information from a government entity that doesn’t want us to have it?

A. This should disturb everyone, whether you're a Republican or a Democrat, but your elected officials cannot get information from the executive branch. Right now, I'm a Republican. The president's a Democrat, but it shouldn't matter. And I've told my Democrat counterparts, if they ever want information [and I were a] Republican president, I cannot think of a records request that I would never sign. But for three years I've been trying to get Democrats to sign records requests.

They will not sign them.

I've asked Bernie Sanders a dozen times – he's the chairman of the health committee – to sign records requests. He will not sign the letters. If I had a couple of Democrat chairman signing the letters, they might be more inclined to give me the records. But this has been going on. I finally got the Democrat Chairman of Homeland Security, Gary Peters, to sign something about six months ago and they're very slowly getting them, piece by piece. But the two documents I told you that are 250 pages long that are completely redacted, I still don't have those.

That’s terrible, but what are your options, what do you have to do to make something happen?

It is terrible. And what do you have to do? You have to take the executive branch to court to force them to give you information. We even voted unanimously in the Senate and the House to declassify all of it. Most of the things I'm asking for aren't even classified. But I think it's because they fear that they are culpable.

Somehow, they funded this research in China. If the virus came from the lab and they funded it, then some guilt is attached to them for having made this mistake, [and that includes] Anthony Fauci and all the others in the NIH.

From early on in 2020, they were trying to suppress any link because they knew they had funded it and they had made a terrible mistake. They funded research that was dangerous, became a pandemic that killed millions of people, and now they don't want the public to know they funded it.

There is a self-interest in covering this up.

Well, if you were president…

I like the concept…

…It does sound like a good idea, but if you really were president, can you think of a way that you could get around this kind of stonewalling? Is there something Congress could pass and that you – as president – would sign to give the Freedom of Information Act more teeth?

I would talk to whoever becomes the next president. If there's a new president from a new party and they have a Secretary of Health and Human Services, one of the requests I'll have with that person is to give it all to me. Give me all the information that went on in determining that we should fund this research in Wuhan and that it wasn't dangerous.

I think there were deliberations and I'd like to see them; it may just be scientific arguments back and forth, but let the public see why Anthony Fauci decided to fund this research that ultimately became the pandemic.

A new president would help. Biden could help [but he hasn’t]. We're probably looking at six or seven months now since I finally got a Democrat to sign [the FOIA request]. But we still have not gotten the information.

I guess that’s my concern and my question, Senator: You are a legislator, but if you create more legislation similar to what is now being ignored by the Biden administration, how do you put more teeth in it? How can you force a government agency to give you what you’re entitled to?

The only way you put teeth into it is if the people dispensing the money call up and say, “HHS gets a trillion dollars? Guess what? We're withholding a hundred billion dollars till we get the records.”

If you do that, you'll get 'em in ten minutes.

The problem is the appropriators are different sets of people in both parties. And I'm not on the committee that funds it. They usually put people on those committees who will vote for all the funding and not try to cut the funding. And so, I would have to have – and our party's not in charge – so it would take a Democrat to say, “We're going to cut your funding.”

Chairmen of appropriation committees can withhold money, maybe temporarily, they can make things tough on them. And usually within hours you get the information you want. But they won't do it for me. I don't have any way of punishing them. It's against the law what they're doing, but there's no way for them really to be prosecuted.

So as a legislator then you couldn't put…

We keep fighting. I wrote this book by getting all the information I can get and most of it is freedom of information from groups to us. Really, most of [what we’ve accumulated] has been outside of government. I brought it all together so people can see in one spot sort of the storyline of what happened.

In fact, one of the most important bits of information came from a whistleblower who worked at Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). I didn't mention him in the speech today. He’s Joseph Murphy a lieutenant colonel in the Marines. He gave us information that there was a [$7 million-plus] grant where the Chinese were trying to create a virus with Ralph Baric [Professor, Department of Epidemiology, Department of Microbiology and Immunology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill] that looks exactly like what Covid became.

But we found out about that only through a whistleblower.

So, this is an amazing sort of pushback by these people. It's something that we have to keep fighting and fighting and fighting, but it's been completely partisan. We can't get Democrats to agree to anything. In order to get a Democrat chairman to sign a request for records, just a simple request for records, I’ve got to hold up like 40 nominees and 50 pieces of legislation, which are all terrible people and terrible bills anyway, so I don't mind doing it, but people say, well, you're just being obstructionist. No, I want court records on what happened. A million Americans died; fifteen million people died around the world, and I want to know why. I want to know why this was approved and how it got [approved]. How they got past the safety committees…

US Senator Rand Paul, left, and Jim Buckley, Editor-in-Chief of Santa Barbara Current

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We’ll explore this subject further via Rand Paul’s “Deception, The Great Covid Cover-Up.” You’ll enjoy the superb mystery-novel-like approach he takes in unraveling the timeline of duplicity conducted by scientists and members of both the U.S. and Communist Chinese governments in next week’s installment of Purely Political Rand Paul (Part III).