Rand Paul Released More Than 1,000 Pages of Fauci's Private Journals Two Days Before Hauling Him In to Testify

Sen. Rand Paul has released more than a thousand pages of private journal entries written by Dr. Anthony Fauci, setting up what is likely to be a hostile hearing Wednesday when the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases appears under subpoena before the Senate Homeland Security Committee.

Paul, the Kentucky Republican who chairs the panel, has spent years pushing the theory that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology rather than jumping naturally from animals to people, and has accused Fauci and other officials of misleading Congress and the public about it. The journals cover December 2019, in the weeks before the United States declared a public health emergency, through December 2022, when Fauci stepped down after nearly four decades running the institute.

Fauci declined to comment to CBS News about the release. Paul's office did not respond to questions about how it obtained the journals. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told Fox News the entries were pulled off government computer servers in recent months.

The scientific dispute the entries feed into is unresolved. Many researchers believe the evidence points to a natural spillover from infected bats through another species to humans handling animals at a Wuhan market, where the first human cases appeared in late 2019. The FBI has assessed the virus "most likely" emerged from a "lab incident in Wuhan," and in January 2025 the CIA issued an assessment favoring the lab-leak hypothesis while labeling its own confidence "low."

Some entries do show early uncertainty. In January 2020 Fauci wrote that "we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier," while adding that "somewhere the virus jumped from animals to humans." About a week later he referenced a conference call in which several senior infectious disease experts raised the possibility that the virus had not originated in nature. Paul seized on that gap Monday, accusing Fauci of saying one thing to "Dear Diary" while telling the public "it's implausible that it came from the lab, and we're really convinced it came from these wild animals in the marketplace. But that level of dishonesty is really astounding."

Fauci's own account of that period reads differently. In a May 26, 2021, entry he wrote that "the situation continues to get 'out of control' with regard to the press reports concerning my 'flip flopping' concerning the theory of the origin of the virus," and restated his position: that a natural animal origin was highly likely, but that "no one is 100% certain of the origin including me and so I am calling for a thorough investigation."

Much of the rest is a record of sudden, disorienting celebrity. "The situation with my national and international fame is explosive and really unimaginable," he wrote on May 21, 2020. "It is not hyoperbole [sic] to say that today I am the most famous and talked about person in the country and one of the most recognizable peson [sic] in the world." He logged Brad Pitt playing him on "Saturday Night Live," a Billy Crystal spoof, an email from Barbra Streisand, and the parade of Fauci masks, murals and bobbleheads — alongside entries expressing embarrassment at the attention and worry about what it meant for his personal security.

The entries about President Trump are the ones most likely to be read aloud Wednesday. Fauci described early interactions as largely positive and said a widely shared photo that appeared to show him facepalming behind the president was "not my intention." Elsewhere he vented about "painfully rambling" and "laborious" news conferences. Before the May 2020 event announcing Operation Warp Speed, Fauci wrote, Trump pulled him aside and said: "Tony, you are losing me trillions of f***ing dollars," then told him "you and I are OK." Trump argued officials should not wear masks at the event because it "sends the wrong signal"; Fauci pushed back. "Tony, we are good, right?" the president asked afterward. Fauci recorded his reply: "We are good Mr. President."