In one of her final official acts as director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard released declassified documents that she said showed Dr. Anthony Fauci helped fund gain-of-function research at China's Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Fauci testified before Congress that the National Institutes of Health did not fund such work.

"The COVID-19 pandemic caused tremendous hardship and pain for millions of our fellow Americans and for countless people around the world," Gabbard said Thursday in a news release.

She is resigning to care for her husband, Abraham, who has a rare form of cancer.

"After years of lies, censorship, and cover-ups, the American people deserve transparency, truth, and accountability," Gabbard said. "The tactics used to hide the truth are straight from the deep state playbook: politicized self-serving leaders like Dr. Fauci covered up their own wrongdoing and abuses of power, manipulated intelligence, lied to Congress, and undermined a duly elected President by restricting his access to vital facts needed to keep the country safe.

"It's time the American people learn the real story."

Gabbard's office said the documents expose how Fauci worked with career intelligence officials "to suppress the truth about his actions, the virus' lab-leak origins, and his role in directing U.S. funding for this dangerous research that caused immeasurable harm and countless lost lives."

Fauci, the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, had maintained the virus originated in a Wuhan wet market rather than leaking from the Wuhan laboratory.

"These documents expose Fauci's direct role in influencing and manipulating IC assessments on COVID-19, and how Fauci lied to Congress in 2024, when under oath he denied knowledge of or participation in discussions with intelligence officials about viral research," Gabbard's office said.

Gabbard's office said the documents directly contradict Fauci's 2024 testimony to the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.

In that hearing, Fauci was repeatedly asked whether he spoke to "FBI, CIA, DIA, or any U.S. intelligence agency concerning viral research" before, during, or after the pandemic.

Fauci said "not to my knowledge about COVID," adding that after investigations began into COVID, "I was briefed by intelligence agencies about possibilities of there being activities going on in different laboratories."

The documents showed Fauci met with intelligence officials, including CIA personnel, on June 4, 2021, almost a month after a Senate hearing in which he denied funding gain-of-function research involving coronaviruses at the Wuhan lab.

While briefing intelligence officials, Fauci "keyed in on specifics" about the Wuhan lab's experiments on pangolin samples, according to a summary report. At the outset of the pandemic, Fauci said he believed the virus originated in an animal, likely a bat or a pangolin, before jumping to humans.

"Dr. Fauci was particularly interested in the WIV's work on pangolins and asked for specifics on the type of experiments the Chinese were conducting on pangolin samples in the fall of 2019," the recap stated.

Another document from the meeting showed that Fauci gave the impression he was "presumably not tracking" the pangolin research.

Fauci is not described as raising any alarms about research at the Wuhan lab, including work funded through NIH grants to EcoHealth Alliance that involved modifying at least three bat coronaviruses and finding they became much more infectious when human-type receptors were added.

The release of the documents came more than a month after a five-year deadline passed during which Fauci could have been charged with perjury for his congressional testimony.

Though Fauci received a preemptive pardon from former President Joe Biden for any crimes committed from Jan. 1, 2014, through Jan. 19, 2025, President Donald Trump has declared the pardon, along with others possibly signed by autopen, null and void, arguing that Biden was mentally diminished and therefore incapable of authorizing it.