Fauci Testifies Under Subpoena at Senate COVID-Origins Hearing After Paul Releases 1,100 Pages of His Diaries

A Diary Taken Down, Then Put Back With Redactions

Anthony Fauci sat before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee at 8:30 a.m. on Wednesday, July 29, 2026^[4][23]. He was there under subpoena, not by invitation. Chairman Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican, issued it in June as part of his committee's investigation into where COVID-19 came from^[2][13].

Days earlier, Paul's committee had posted more than 1,100 pages of what he says are Fauci's personal diary entries, running from December 2019 through December 2022^[2][3]. The file went up over the weekend of July 25-26. It came down Monday evening. It went back up Tuesday morning, this time redacted^[2]. Paul also released a separate batch of 465 pages of older Fauci records and emails, dating back to 2001^[3]. Neither Paul's office nor Fauci has said how the committee got the journal in the first place^[2].

Fauci is 85. He led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for nearly four decades, from 1984 until he retired in December 2022^[2]. Wednesday put him back in a hearing room he knows well, but under different rules than any hearing before it.

The Line Both Sides Quote, and What It Left Out

One diary entry is doing most of the work in this fight. On Jan. 26, 2020, Fauci reportedly wrote that the Wuhan wet market "was not the source, it was the amplifier"^[5]. Paul reads that as proof Fauci privately doubted the market story while publicly leaning on it^[5][14]. A second entry, from Feb. 1, 2020, describes a call among scientists where "there was not total agreement" on origins^[5]. To Paul, that is a man who knew the science was shakier than he let on.

Here is the piece missing from that reading. About three weeks after writing the "amplifier" line in his diary, Fauci said almost the same thing out loud, in public, in a USA Today interview in February 2020^[24]. If he was hiding a private view, he was hiding it by repeating it to a national newspaper. Neither disputed entry mentions a laboratory at all^[1][5].

That does not make the diary irrelevant. It just changes what it can prove. Early uncertainty among scientists in January 2020 is well documented and not itself evidence of a cover-up^[1][6][7]. Whether it becomes one depends on what happened next, and that is a judgment call, not a fact sitting in the diary.

Two Men, One Grant, and a Word That Means Different Things to Each of Them

Underneath the diary fight sits an older, more technical one, and it turns on a single term: gain-of-function research. In plain language, that is lab work that makes a virus more transmissible or more dangerous, done to study it. The U.S. government defines it narrowly. Work only counts if it is reasonably expected to make a pathogen that could already cause a pandemic more transmissible or more deadly in people.

Paul says NIAID money reached coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, through a subgrant to the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance. He says that means Fauci lied to Congress when he denied funding that kind of work^[13]. Fauci has denied it too, but in the government's narrower sense: under that specific definition, he says, the funded work did not qualify^[13].

Both men can be talking about the exact same grant. Neither has to be lying. Paul is using the word the way most people would in conversation. Fauci is using the word the way a regulation defines it. Which one is right depends entirely on which definition is supposed to govern the answer, and that argument has run for five years without settling^[13].

Why This Hearing Carries Legal Weight the Last Ones Didn't

In January 2025, President Biden gave Fauci a pardon covering any federal offenses from Jan. 1, 2014 up to the date of the pardon^[12]. That protects everything Fauci has said about the pandemic up to now. It protects nothing he says under oath going forward^[12].

That single fact changes the hearing's stakes. A pardoned witness generally cannot plead the Fifth Amendment to avoid answering about conduct the pardon already covers, because the risk of prosecution for that conduct is gone. So the pardon, meant to close old exposure, opens a narrow new one: whatever Fauci says on the record Wednesday is fully exposed to a perjury charge if it turns out false^[12].

That is also the practical reason critics say Paul wanted him under oath now rather than relying on past testimony. A private diary is evidence of what Fauci thought. Sworn testimony is a legal document with consequences attached. The two are not the same kind of risk, and Wednesday's hearing was built around the second one^[7][12].

What the Government's Own Files Still Don't Agree On

Strip away the diary and the definitions, and the origins question is still open inside the U.S. government itself. In January 2025, the CIA said a lab origin was more likely than a natural one, but rated its own judgment "low confidence" and said it relied on no new intelligence^[10][11]. In intelligence work, "low confidence" is not a hedge for politeness. It means the judgment rests on thin or unverified information and could turn out wrong. The FBI leans toward a lab origin with moderate confidence. The Energy Department leans that way too, at low confidence. Other agencies lean toward a natural spillover from animals^[10].

Peer-reviewed science points the other way. The earliest known COVID cases cluster around Wuhan's Huanan seafood market, not around the virology institute^[16]. A 2024 study in the journal Cell found genetic material from raccoon dogs, an animal susceptible to related coronaviruses, in the same market samples that tested positive for the virus^[15]. Neither body of evidence has knocked out the other.

China has not opened the records that could break the tie: the Wuhan Institute's early lab logs, personnel health files, and the market's original animal samples^[10]. Beijing's public position is that the lab-leak theory is political rather than scientific, and that if labs deserve scrutiny, the U.S. Army's Fort Detrick facility deserves the same look^[17][18]. An April 2025 Chinese government white paper argued the U.S. politicized the pandemic and hid its own early cases^[19]. Beijing has consistently redirected toward American conduct rather than defending the Wuhan institute's records directly.

How Newsrooms Told Two Different Stories From the Same Documents

Coverage of the hearing split along familiar lines. Fox News led with the diaries as revelation, foregrounding the wet-market and mask-doubt entries without noting that they never name a lab^[5]. Paul's own op-ed in Fox News went further, calling the story a "cover-up" in the headline before Fauci had answered a single question^[14]. The Epoch Times, founded by practitioners of Falun Gong and long opposed to the Chinese Communist Party, wrote that the diary shows the CIA "obtained secret information about Wuhan lab," treating a reference to intelligence as if it confirmed what that intelligence said^[21].

NPR and CNN framed the story differently, centering the Paul-Fauci rivalry itself over the diary's contents. NPR put "diary" in scare quotes and described the entries as ones "Republican lawmakers say were written by" Fauci, a hedge about authorship that Fox and the Examiner did not carry^[1]. CNN called it a "long-running battle," a frame that places Paul's history of pursuing Fauci ahead of his claims^[6]. The trade outlet STAT came closest to flatly naming the legal stakes, treating the origins question as still unresolved rather than leaning either direction^[7]. Al Jazeera, with no domestic stake in either man, kept the CIA's "low confidence" caveat intact where some U.S. outlets dropped it^[11].

None of that settles where the virus came from. What Wednesday's hearing did settle is smaller but concrete: Fauci is now on the record, under oath, in a way the pardon cannot reach. Whether anything he said crosses into legal trouble is a question that will play out separately from the origins debate — one with an answer, eventually, unlike the other^[12].