FBI Director Kash Patel announced on Friday a significant “breakthrough” in the investigation into the origins of COVID-19, stating that the devices, including phones used by Dr. Anthony Fauci during the earliest stages of the pandemic, have been recovered.
Dr. Fauci, who was a key medical figure throughout the pandemic, is under investigation as part of a broader inquiry into the inception of COVID-19 and the U.S. response.
Patel informed podcaster Joe Rogan that initially, the FBI was unable to find any of the devices Fauci had used at the pandemic’s start in 2020. However, these devices reportedly surfaced just a few 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.
