Rand Paul says Fauci caught in lies to Congress about coronavirus research: 'Dead to rights'

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said Thursday on "Fox & Friends" that he believes Dr. Anthony Fauci is caught in a clear case of "perjury" related to his past testimony to Congress about coronavirus research in China. Paul explained why he is pursuing an "official criminal referral" of Fauci to the Department of Justice for lying under oath.

RAND PAUL BLASTS FAUCI AS JUDGE DEMANDS MISINFORMATION EMAILS

RAND PAUL: I don't think there's ever been a clearer case of perjury in the history of government testimony, and I don't say that lightly. He said adamantly that the government never funded this gain-of-function research. We now have the Government Accountability Office, the GAO, has admitted that the funding came from the NIH. We have the acting director [Lawrence] Tabak, of the NIH, admitting it in writing that it came from the NIH. But now we have, really, the smoking gun, and that is Fauci in private saying the opposite of what he was saying in public when he was publicly telling me that absolutely, we do not fund gain-of-function research in China. He says privately we are suspicious that the virus has been manipulated and we are suspicious because we know they are doing gain-of-function research. He then goes on to describe the research, and it's exactly the research that the NIH funded. So he's caught dead to rights here, but we have an incredibly partisan Attorney General [Merrick] Garland, who is refusing to act, so I've taken the extraordinary step of actually going to the local U.S. attorney in D.C. to see if he will act. The problem is there are partisans littered throughout the legal system, and people are seeing this. You don't get prosecuted if you're a Democrat under this administration, no matter what you do.

Paul pointed to an email from February 2020 in which Fauci detailed a call with British medical researcher Jeremy Farrar, who was director of the Wellcome Trust at the time.

According to Fauci, those on the task-force call, including Francis Collins, former director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, and other "highly credible" scientists with expertise in evolutionary biology, expressed concern about the "fact upon viewing the sequences of several isolates of the nCoV, there were mutations in the virus that would be most unusual to have evolved naturally in the bats and that there was a suspicion that this mutation was intentionally inserted."

"The suspicion was heightened by the fact that scientists in Wuhan University are known to have been working on gain-of-function experiments to determine the molecular mechanisms associated with bat viruses adapting to human infection, and the outbreak originated in Wuhan," Fauci wrote, according to a screenshot of the newly unredacted email shared by RealClearPolitics White House reporter Philip Wegmann. 

Fauci insisted that he had "never lied before Congress" during prior testimony in May, telling Paul that "you don't know what you're talking about." Fauci further denied that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded gain-of-function research, despite Paul citing a journal article titled "Discovery of a rich gene pool of bat SARS-related coronaviruses."

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Fox News' Danielle Wallace contributed to this report.