On her final day as director of national intelligence Friday, Tulsi Gabbard released damning declassified evidence accusing Dr. Anthony Fauci of causing the COVID-19 pandemic, engaging in a cover-up about the virus origins in China and lying to Congress about it.

Perhaps most disturbingly, he was assisted by the US intelligence community.

“It’s time you know the truth,” said Gabbard when she released “never-before-seen communications and documents exposing how Dr. Fauci provided millions in US taxpayer dollars to fund dangerous gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab, worked with politicized elements within the Intelligence Community to suppress the truth about his actions and hide the virus’ lab-leak origins, and lied to Congress while under oath in 2024 . . . The tactics used to hide the truth are straight from the deep state playbook.”

Right on cue, two days after the bombshell release, on Sunday, The Washington Post ran a 9,000-word hit piece accusing Gabbard of taking instructions from a Hindu “cult leader” described in the headline as her “guru.”

It was a gratuitous exercise in guilt-by-association masquerading as an investigation, another tactic straight from the deep state playbook.

Meanwhile, The Washington Post did not publish a word about Gabbard’s Fauci revelations.

Nor, for that matter, did any mainstream outlet on the left.

Fauci protected

The same news organizations that helped cover up the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, now overwhelmingly believed to have come from a leak from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, are still refusing to come clean. On liberal social media platform Bluesky, they’re still talking about wet markets and pangolins.

Meanwhile, Fauci, 85, on a handsome government pension, holds a prestigious role as “Distinguished University Professor” at Georgetown University and is showered with rich awards for “defending science.”

Gabbard’s revelations go some way to explaining the surreal disconnect.

Fauci is protected by the deep state and its tentacles, which extend deep into the media, academia and other reputation-enhancing institutions.

His “close relationships” with the intelligence community “shielded him from scrutiny as he wielded outsized influence,” said Gabbard.

“Fauci was the behind-the-scenes advisor who, alongside his hand-picked so-called experts, pushed the intelligence community to endorse a natural, animal origin to hide his dangerous gain-of-function research that he funded using taxpayer dollars.”

Gabbard, who had to leave the role due to her husband’s illness, did her best to fight for transparency against an array of forces in Washington that regarded her as a loose cannon and sought to shut her out.

But President Trump has installed bulldog Bill Pulte as her interim successor, despite the best efforts by the Senate to expedite the confirmation of Jay Clayton, the former SEC chairman whom Trump has named the next DNI. Trump intervened (ostensibly for another reason) to slow the process, giving Pulte time to look for more bodies.

Paul challenges pardon

Meanwhile, Fauci’s nemesis, maverick Republican Sen. Rand Paul, has again sent criminal referrals to the DOJ against Fauci for the 2024 alleged perjury Gabbard detailed in her Friday dump.

Perhaps more significantly, Paul insists the 11-year blanket pardon Joe Biden issued for Fauci, in his last minutes on his last day in office, should be challenged in court, both because it was signed with an autopen and because of its rare retrospective nature.

Curiously, Fauci’s pardon stretches back to the exact date of Hunter Biden’s retrospective blanket pardon: January 1, 2014, and encompasses his oversight of NIH/NIAID funding of gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab, via the New York-based cut-out EcoHealth Alliance.

The now-defunct EcoHealth was a non-profit supposedly devoted to predicting future pandemics, situated in a nondescript Manhattan office building. Its enigmatic founder, Peter Daszak, received millions of dollars in various grants from Fauci’s outfit, but his biggest donor was the Department of Defense, which gave him more than $40 million for the purpose of “combating weapons of mass destruction.”

Back in August 2021, I was told by a former EcoHealth employee, who requested anonymity, that Daszak had been “approached by the CIA in late 2015” to help access the Wuhan lab, believed to be a Chinese military operation.

Daszak later told House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer that he had been contacted by the CIA and other intelligence agencies, although he didn’t say when.

If the intelligence community knew about the dangerous gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses at Wuhan, did it know about evidence of a potential leak as early as August 2019?

That was the start of a dramatic increase in car traffic around major hospitals in Wuhan, in the late summer and fall of 2019, long before the outbreak was reported to the world.

A Harvard Medical School study published in June 2020 found that aerial images captured by private satellites of five Wuhan hospitals suggested a health crisis was underway at the time.

Traffic and parking lot volume were compared with the same period in 2018. There was “a steep increase in volume starting in August 2019,” says the paper, “culminating with a peak in December 2019,” the date of the first confirmed COVID-19 case.

Between September and October 2019, five of the six hospitals showed the most traffic, “coinciding with elevated levels of [Chinese search engine] Baidu search queries for the terms ‘diarrhea’ and ‘cough.’ ”

Iran distraction

Back in the US, in August 2019, an anonymous whistleblower, now known as CIA analyst Eric Ciaramella, lodged the complaint that led to Trump’s Ukraine impeachment.

The White House was consumed by the impeachment during the fall and winter of 2019, when the COVID-19 virus started circulating in the US.

Today, the White House is distracted by Iran, so transparency about the role of the intelligence agencies in protecting Fauci and covering up the origins of the pandemic is probably not a priority.

Despite Gabbard and Senator Paul’s efforts, there is a distinct possibility that nobody will be held accountable for what Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. last week called “among the most consequential crimes in human history.”

Maybe some secrets are just too terrible to be told.

UNEDITED SECOND JOB

Zohran Mamdani and Kathy Hochul campaigned on making housing affordable, yet Realtor.com’s latest Report Card finds New York has plummeted to the worst state in America for housing affordability and homebuilding: 51st of 51 states.

Congress has stepped in with a rare bipartisan bid to address America’s four-million-home shortage. But Washington can’t fix a problem created in Albany and City Hall.

“The federal government has done a commendable job on the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, but… the reality is that most housing is controlled by state and local governments,” says Damian Eales, CEO of Realtor.com. 

“Cutting red tape, relaxing zoning requirements, and opening up land for development are inherently local challenges that will have to be solved to address the 4 million shortfall in housing.” 

New York earned an F grade and a measly 8.5 out of 100 on the report card. 

New York City fares little better, ranking  296th out of America’s 300 largest metros.

New York’s median home price is now $668,173, requiring 55.2% of median household income to afford. 

The state is building at less than half the rate its population would suggest. 

Indiana ranks No. 1, followed by Iowa, South Carolina, Texas and North Carolina.

More than 80% of the highest-ranking states are Republican, while Democratic strongholds, including New York, California, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, languish at the bottom of the rankings.

“Undoubtedly, political ideology is playing a role,” says Eales. “To maintain the American dream of homeownership, we must … work to remove barriers so we can get shovels into the soil and build the homes America desperately needs.”

Amen. Talk is cheap.