The walls — and evidence — are slowly building around Dr. Anthony Fauci

Sen. Rand Paul is examining Dr. Anthony Fauci’s government-issued phone and says he is taking a special interest in whether it contains evidence of “deletions.”

That’s significant because Fauci’s former factotum, David Morens, is awaiting trial on charges of concealing and destroying government records, allegedly on behalf of his boss, and is facing up to 51 years in prison. Not that many people know that, since only one reporter covered his arraignment in May: The Post’s own Josh Christenson.

Paul may have bigger ambitions for Fauci than the criminal referral for contempt of Congress he sent off to the DOJ last week, after the former COVID czar pleaded the Fifth an excruciating 111 times in his Senate committee testimony rather than come clean with the American people about why he funded dangerous gain-of-function research in China’s Wuhan lab.

If Fauci can be shown to have concealed or destroyed government records, then he could find himself sitting alongside Morens in the dock, depending on how robust his last-minute pre-emptive autopen pardon from Joe Biden proves to be.

Already on record

In previous data dumps from Paul’s Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Fauci is already on record telling two associates to delete emails.

On February 2, 2020, in the early stages of the pandemic, Fauci wrote to his boss Dr. Francis Collins, then director of the NIH, about the WHO’s handling of questions about the origins of COVID: “Please delete this email after you read it.”

On July 20, 2020, Fauci emailed his chief of staff, Greg Folkers, about Paul’s accurate claim that Florida’s handling of COVID was more successful than New York’s, writing that the senator, a licensed doctor who volunteered at a Kentucky hospital during the pandemic, was “full of s–t”, before instructing Folkers to “please delete this e-mail after you read it.”

Fauci declared in sworn congressional testimony in 2024 that he never deleted official records and has repeatedly distanced himself from Morens and denied knowledge of the “secret back channel” Morens claimed in emails that he had to his boss.

Like the pardon of his son, Hunter, Joe Biden’s retrospective pardon covered Fauci for any offenses he may have committed in the seven years between Jan. 1, 2014, and the end of Biden’s term in January 2025, related to his work as director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a member of the White House’s COVID-19 task force and chief medical adviser to the president.

The unusual start date of the pardon, six years before the pandemic began, suggests some of Fauci’s legal problems are connected to the period when he was funding dangerous gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology from which a lab leak is believed to have sparked the global health crisis that led to millions of deaths.

Pardon’s long cover

Fauci’s pardon covers the Obama administration’s Oct. 17, 2014, moratorium on gain-of-function funding to prevent experiments that could make certain viruses more potent and more infectious to humans, a safety measure driven by a group of scientists worried about the potential of a lab leak to spark a lethal pandemic.

The pardon covers Fauci’s June 2014 grant to EcoHealth Alliance, that outsourced the Frankenstein research to the Wuhan lab, whose subpar biosecurity made it more likely to suffer a mishap.

Fauci and his boss Francis Collins have categorically denied that they funded the research at Wuhan, but the funding path via cutout EcoHealth is documented and undeniable, as is Fauci and Morens’ pally relationship with EcoHealth head Peter Daszak. Included in the case against Morens are allegations he accepted bottles of wine from an unnamed co-conspirator reported to be Daszak.

Paul has claimed that Fauci is playing semantics over the definition of “gain-of function”and that the once all-powerful health bureaucrat should be jailed for his role in the deaths of “somewhere between 10 and 20 million” people during the pandemic.

Even if the Biden pardon withstands legal challenge, several Republican state attorneys general, including in Florida and Louisiana, opened investigations into Fauci, 85, after his Senate testimony and the release of his diary, over potential state crimes such as self-dealing.

Fauci’s government-issued phone was uncovered last June by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., according to FBI Director Kash Patel, who told podcaster Joe Rogan at the time about the “great breakthrough.”

“We think that there was definite foul play . . . That’s what we’re working on,” Patel told Rogan last June.

Media protection

Kennedy also discovered Fauci’s embarrassing diary entries after scouring government computers for “about eight months to dig these out of 11 separate servers where they had been sequestered and secreted,” Kennedy told Fox News.

Earlier this month, HHS transferred a forensic copy of the phone to Paul and Sen. Ron Johnson’s committee, whose investigators are examining it for evidence of who knew what, when, and potentially what role Collins played in the Wuhan funding and the initial cover-up of the origins of COVID.

Paul told Mark Halperin’s podcast last week that his investigators were searching for evidence of deleted material on the phone and any “indication someone has cleaned up or wiped the phone.”

If such evidence is found, it would place Fauci in the same boat as Morens.

When given an opportunity in his Senate testimony to defend Morens, Fauci pleaded the Fifth and let him swing. Fauci has repeatedly distanced himself from the man who had been his friend, a frequent guest to his house, a senior adviser of 16 years and co-author of more than 50 scientific papers.

Nobody would be surprised if Morens repaid the disloyalty by offering to testify against Fauci if he were offered a plea deal.

So far, all that is known about the opaque case is that Morens declared his innocence at his arraignment. The fact that only one journalist bothered showing up is a troubling sign of the ongoing media and Democrat protection of Fauci.