America’s former pandemic darling Tony Fauci has crashed back into American politics—dragging several of his former top aides with him, along with the Democrat Party.

This time, the issue is not masks, mandates, lockdowns, or six-foot distancing.

It is a far more fundamental question: Did SARS-CoV-2 emerge from laboratory research in Wuhan involving gain-of-function techniques, and did research funded directly or indirectly through Fauci with American taxpayer dollars help trigger the pandemic?

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, chaired by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), is trying to get answers. Instead, it keeps running into witnesses who invoke their Fifth Amendment right not to testify, lest they incriminate themselves.

First came Fauci himself. Subpoenaed by Paul’s committee, Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment rights 111 times. Then, late last month, another Fauci insider — his special assistant of fifteen years — also took the Fifth.

I had skin in this game from the beginning. As the first Trump administration’s quartermaster during the pandemic, I was working to secure the masks, gloves, gowns, ventilators, testing swabs and other supplies Americans desperately needed. I also helped initiate Operation Warp Speed. And I said publicly on Fox News in April 2020 that the trail of the virus pointed inexorably toward the Wuhan bioweapons lab.

What we desperately lacked at the time was not the published sequence of the virus — that had become available in January, and vaccine scientists rapidly put it to work. What we lacked were the Wuhan laboratory records, virus inventories, raw sequence data, research notebooks, databases and progenitor-virus information that could have told us what had actually happened inside that laboratory.

We were fighting the fog of the pandemic while being denied critical information about its possible source, even as Fauci was engineering his now infamous “Proximal Origin” coverup of the possible lab origins and the possible role of his agency in the creation of the virus.

But Paul now appears to have an unnamed material witness who was standing immediately outside Fauci’s door when the most important conversations occurred.

On January 31, 2020, Wellcome Trust director Jeremy Farrar urgently emailed Fauci asking to speak with him that evening. Fauci’s special assistant, Patricia Conrad, answered on Fauci’s behalf: “Will call shortly.”

What happened next is extraordinary. That same day, scientist Kristian Andersen told Fauci that some features of the virus “(potentially) look engineered.” Fauci has testified that he told Andersen that if the concern held up, the authorities to notify would be the FBI and Britain’s MI5.

But Paul says the committee, reviewing logs Fauci kept on a government computer, found the assistant telling Fauci she had destroyed “a ton of emails” over a weekend — “hundreds, if not thousands” of records, which turns out to have been “a routine practice” in Fauci’s office. Who gave the order? What conversations did she witness? Whom did Fauci call? What happened to those records?

After the assistant invoked the Fifth, Paul offered the obvious mechanism for getting answers: immunity.  “It was never our intention really to try to have her indicted,” Paul said. “We wanted to know who gave her the orders.”

Every Republican voted to proceed. Every Democrat voted against. The vote was 8 to 7. Because Paul needed two additional votes for the required two-thirds, the effort failed. Only one Democrat showed up; six voted no by proxy.

Concealment inside Fauci’s agency is no longer hypothetical. David Morens, Fauci’s senior adviser, pleaded guilty in August to conspiracy for hiding federal records on his personal Gmail — records on the EcoHealth gain-of-function grant, its Wuhan subaward, and countering the lab-leak narrative.

This is precisely the territory I explore in my new book “Why Fauci Must Rot in Prison” What was happening behind the curtain while decisions affecting hundreds of millions of Americans were being made? And why did Fauci privately text that a second vaccine dose “theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the first trimester” while publicly telling pregnant women the shots were safe?

Documents tell us what somebody wrote down. Diaries tell us what somebody chose to record. Aides like Morens and Conrad see the machinery.

This should not be a partisan issue. More than a million Americans across party lines died from COVID. Some 17 million adults have have reported long COVID, and more than 11,000 have filed federal claims of injury or death from the vaccines. And all of us were locked down, double-masked, and threatened with firing if we did not submit to the jab.

Yet Democrats have inexplicably circled their wagons around Fauci, who has officially morphed from everybody’s favorite bobblehead into every Democrat’s albatross in November.

Rand Paul is not letting up, and neither am I. Let’s get to the truth.