FBI Director Kash Patel claimed Friday that there was a recent “breakthrough” in the COVID-19 origins probe after recovering the devices, including phones, that Dr. Anthony Fauci used in the earliest days of the pandemic.
Fauci, one of the primary medical leaders during the deadly pandemic, is being investigated as part of the larger inquiry into how COVID started and America’s response.
Patel told podcaster Joe Rogan that the FBI originally couldn’t locate any of the devices Fauci used during the beginning of the pandemic in 2020 — but they apparently turned up just days ago.
“They had always been looking for phones and devices he used while he was back in Trump one [the first Trump administration] during COVID, and nobody had found it until two days ago,” Patel said during an episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience.”
However, Patel cautioned that the content on the devices might be inconsequential — or even long gone.
“Everybody listening to us shouldn’t jump to the conclusion [that] everything’s in there. Maybe it’s deleted, maybe it’s not, but at least we found it, and at least now we can tell people that we have been looking because it is of public importance.”
Fauci has come under heavy fire since the pandemic for his flip-flopping policies on public safety, mainly by Republican stalwarts, including President Trump.
The worst wave of the pandemic, stretching from March 2020 through the summer, came during the final months of Trump’s first term in office.
Just hours before Trump was inaugurated in January, former President Joe Biden preemptively pardoned Fauci to protect him from being prosecuted as Trump and Republicans claimed the White House, House and Senate.
The president has repeatedly condemned Biden’s move, calling the pardon “VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT” on TruthSocial in March.
Fauci’s pardon is still in effect.
The FBI and the CIA both asserted that COVID likely came from a lab leak in Wuhan, China, which had been conducting different experiments on coronaviruses in the years preceding the disastrous pandemic.
The lab leak theory was previously denounced as a conspiracy theory during the height of the pandemic. Fauci has been accused of suppressing information indicating the veracity of the lab leak, which he denied before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic last year.
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