Rand Paul’s Letter to Gabbard Re-Opens the COVID Intel Files

How new documents link U.S. intelligence, Ralph Baric, and gain-of-function research — echoing Tulsi Gabbard’s own warnings about the Deep State.

Executive Summary

• Sen. Rand Paul has released a letter revealing that U.S. intelligence agencies contacted coronavirus researcher Dr. Ralph Baric as early as 2015 — five years before the pandemic.¹

• The documents show ODNI and CIA coordination with Baric on “coronavirus evolution and possible human adaptation” and later classified briefings on lab-leak scenarios.

• Dr. Baric’s collaborations with Wuhan’s Dr. Zhengli Shi and EcoHealth Alliance’s Peter Daszak appear repeatedly across the correspondence now sought by Paul’s Senate committee.

• Tulsi Gabbard, now Director of National Intelligence, foreshadowed this in her May 2025 interview with Megyn Kelly, promising to expose intelligence secrecy and gain-of-function complicity — a pledge now intersecting with Paul’s probe.

Rand Paul’s New Revelation

On October 30 2025, Senator Rand Paul sent a formal letter to Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbardafter uncovering records showing U.S. intel contact with Dr. Ralph Baric dating back to 2015.

“In a September 2015 email, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the CIA contacted Dr. Ralph Baric to discuss a ‘possible project’ on coronavirus evolution and possible natural human adaptation.” — Letter from Sen. Rand Paul to DNI Tulsi Gabbard, Oct 30 2025.

Less than two months after those emails, Baric and Wuhan’s Dr. Zhengli Shi co-authored the Nature Medicine paper A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence — funded through USAID’s PREDICT and NIH grants widely described as gain-of-function research.

Paul’s letter further documents that:

• 2018 – Baric and Shi appeared again as collaborators on EcoHealth Alliance’s DEFUSE proposal to DARPA, which proposed inserting a furin cleavage site — the very motif later found in SARS-CoV-2.

• Jan 2020 – Baric briefed ODNI’s Biological Sciences Experts Group (BSEG), presenting slides titled “Origins,” in which he raised the possibility of an accidental lab release at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Paul is now demanding all correspondence since 2012 among intelligence and health-agency officials — Baric, Daszak, Fauci, Collins, Farrar, Lipkin, and others — encompassing every mention of “COVID-19 origins,” “gain-of-function (GOF),” and “dual-use research (DURC).”

His investigation points to a continuum of cooperation between intelligence services and a select circle of researchers whose work shaped the pandemic era. Read the official announcement on the Homeland Security Governmental Affairs website here.

A Parallel Voice: Tulsi Gabbard Speaks Out

Just months before receiving Paul’s letter, Tulsi Gabbard had already framed the issue in strikingly similar terms.

In a May 2025 conversation with Megyn Kelly, she spoke as Director of National Intelligence about her internal fight against secrecy, the “deep rot in the intelligence community,” and the need to declassify records surrounding gain-of-function research and COVID’s origins.

“The American people deserve to know who knew what — and when — about these experiments. Transparency isn’t a threat to national security; secrecy is.” — Tulsi Gabbard, The Megyn Kelly Show, May 1 2025³

She also confirmed her collaboration with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to track government grants and expose whether Dr. Anthony Fauci had misled Congress regarding risky viral-engineering projects.

In light of Paul’s new disclosures, Gabbard’s earlier comments now read less like rhetoric and more like an open-source roadmap for what the Senate is finally uncovering.

Threads Converging

Both Paul and Gabbard are describing the same architecture of concealment:

• Scientific Link Baric, Shi, Daszak coordinate U.S.–China coronavirus work. BSEG briefings discuss possible lab leak. Paul’s committee demands ODNI/CIA emails

• Institutional Link CIA & ODNI request Baric’s expertise. NIH & USAID funding lines. Homeland Security & ODNI review

• Narrative Link “Natural spillover” frame dominates. Lab-leak dismissed as conspiracy. Lab-leak returns as classified subject

The key transformation is that what was once branded misinformation is now the subject of an official Senate inquiry directed at the intelligence community itself.

Gabbard’s on-air insistence that declassification was the only path to “national reconciliation through truth” suddenly looks prophetic.

Why This Matters

This isn’t simply a story about lab research; it’s about democratic oversight of biotechnological power.

If intelligence agencies were actively consulting with scientists performing potential gain-of-function work — then later shaping the narrative that denied those risks — the implications reach far beyond medicine. They touch on governance, accountability, and the right to know.

Paul’s letter marks the moment when legislative subpoena power collides with the culture of classification. And Gabbard’s role ensures that those secrets, for the first time, sit under the purview of someone who vowed to expose them.

A Continuum of Transparency: From Censorship to Declassification

Paul’s intelligence-oversight probe now intersects directly with Tulsi Gabbard’s wider campaign for government transparency and declassification. Months before this latest revelation, Gabbard had already drawn national attention for pledging to expose the Biden administration’s “blueprint for silencing dissent,” a classified domestic-surveillance and censorship strategy revealed in my April 5, 2025 essay, “How Tulsi Gabbard’s commitment to transparency may unravel the most coordinated censorship campaign in American history.”

In that earlier report, Gabbard vowed to declassify evidence showing how intelligence and security agencies had been weaponized to suppress constitutionally protected speech — the very pattern now re-emerging in Senator Paul’s investigation of intelligence ties to coronavirus research. The through-line is unmistakable: the same culture of secrecy that shielded gain-of-function collaboration from oversight also enabled the censorship of those who questioned it.

Gabbard’s two fronts — exposing biomedical secrecy and dismantling digital censorship — reveal a single architecture of control. What began as a promise to liberate the truth about speech suppression is now expanding into the biomedical domain, where public-health narratives were protected by classification itself.

Related Call To Action

If you want to help end the kind of corruption now coming to light, support our landmark federal civil-rights lawsuit — a case seeking to hold accountable those who censored millions of Americans during the declared COVID-19 pandemic and to ensure that such violations of our constitutional freedoms can never happen again. Learn more below.