Fauci’s Behind-The-Scenes War With Peter Navarro (And Trump)
By Jeff Carlson & Hans Mahncke
As promised, here’s the story of Fauci’s behind-the-scenes sabotage of the Trump Administration. Our prior post, The Intelligence Community’s Covid Origin Coverup, is a useful prelude to this story. It might be worth a quick read if you haven’t done so - particularly as the two stories are so closely entwined.
In the first four months of the Covid Pandemic there was a quiet battle raging behind the scenes regarding the origins of covid. The battle pitted Trump and a few members of his administration against most of the Intelligence Community, many of Trump’s own advisors - and Anthony Fauci. But there was also a subplot. An ongoing battle between Trump adviser Peter Navarro and Fauci. The two men clashed often but Fauci was helped by the media - and the Intelligence Community.
Part of this story involves Fauci’s private actions, which were diametrically opposed to his public statements - and as jaded as we already were in regards to Fauci, we still found ourselves taken aback at just how duplicitous he really was. Of necessity we're going to cover a number of dates, so we hope that you'll bear with us.
On December 28, 2019, just as the pandemic took off, a Chinese scientist sought to publish the genetic profile of the coronavirus a full two weeks before China formally released the sequence. Lili Ren, a Chinese virologist, submitted the genetic sequence of Covid to GenBank - the National Institutes of Health's genetic database. Shockingly, the NIH informed Ren that her submission lacked certain required technical information and would be deleted if this data was not provided. Ren never responded to NIH and the valuable sequence was inexplicably deleted.
But it turns out that the sequence was incredibly important. Dr. Jesse Bloom later analyzed the sequence and determined that “this submission would have provided adequate information to initiate vaccine production in late 2019 if it had been made public.” Bloom also noted that the sequence invalidated China’s claim that “the causative agent of the Wuhan pneumonia outbreak still had not been identified near the end of the first week of January 2020.”
As a result of NIH’s “deletion,” Covid’s genetic sequence was not made public until January 11, 2020 - and wasn’t published on GenBank’s site until the next day, Jan 12th. Amazingly, it was Eddie Holmes of Proximal Origin fame who posted the sequence information - and he was lauded by Wellcome Trust’s Jeremy Farrar for doing so. Left unsaid was a later admission from Holmes that he actually had the full sequence back on January 5, 2020 but was instructed by China not to release the sequence until January 11th.
A few weeks later, on February 1, 2020, Holmes would tell Farrar and the rest of Fauci's secret teleconference group that he was “80 percent sure the virus came out of a lab.” We’ve never gotten a convincing answer as to why NIH deleted the sequence without analysis but the deletion by NIH conveniently gave China the same delay that they were demanding from Holmes. Meanwhile, crucial time - and lives - were lost in those early days.
The day after Holmes posted the Covid sequence, on January 13th, Fauci and Moderna quietly agreed to go ahead with manufacturing of the so-called mRNA Covid vaccines on a mass scale - despite claims from the World Health Organization that there was “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission.” Recall that Fauci was publicly claiming in February 2020 that the risk from Covid was “minuscule”, telling people to skip masks and just wash their hands. According to Fauci, the flu was a much bigger risk than was Covid. As a quick side note, we’ve continuously found ourselves troubled by Fauci’s early public Covid stance versus his private actions.
At the same time that Fauci was downplaying the risks from the growing pandemic, Trump’s trade advisor Peter Navarro was raising very real alarms about the Covid outbreak. And the two men would clash repeatedly over the next several months. On January 29, 2020, the same day that Fauci joined the White House Task Force, Navarro drafted the first of two memos, making the case for an “immediate travel ban on China.” In his second memo, Navarro warned Covid could infect as many as 100 million Americans, and cause 1 million deaths.
But there was a problem. Trump didn’t see Navarro's memos, which were sent to the National Security Council. As we’ll see, Trump wasn’t made aware of them until April 6th, when the media reported on the memos which had been strategically leaked to the press. Now keep in mind that while all this was ongoing, Fauci was working in the background to establish the Natural Origin Narrative that was crafted during his February 1st secret teleconference. As we’ve discussed before, Fauci even had a direct hand in the creation of Proximal Origin, which was used to discredit any discussion of a lab leak.
Fauci had been busy with other things as well. On February 4, 2020, Fauci spoke privately with the head of the Chinese CDC, Gau Fu, “to exchange information on the epidemic”. The meeting had been facilitated by the dean of Harvard Medical School in a bizarre sequence of events that involved a pledge of $115 million to Harvard Medical School. China had official channels for communication. Why the need for a side channel into Fauci? Was China worried over a possible early determination of a lab leak by the US that would implicate them for the Covid pandemic?
As this was going on, the Intelligence Community was being pushed for answers. We now know that the FBI was told at the onset that Covid came from a lab leak and they created a new task force that was investigating EcoHealth as being the entity behind the creation of the Covid virus no later than early April - but more likely in March 2020. This information came from Richard Ebright, a famous molecular biologist, who was interviewed by the FBI’s task force in April and May of 2020 to help the FBI understand the intricate details contained within the EcoHealth work that was funded by Fauci and the NIH.
For reasons that remain unknown, the FBI’s task force would be disbanded in late May or June 2020. As the FBI was investigating EcoHealth, an internal State Department analysis was drafted regarding the possible origins for Covid. The analysis concluded that a leak from the Wuhan Lab likely caused the pandemic. The memo also noted that "all other proposed theories are likely to be a decoy." The memo should have destroyed the Natural Origin Narrative. But as we’ll see, Fauci, with help from the Intelligence Community, kept the natural Origin narrative alive and made any discussion of a lab leak impossible.
On April 4th, 2020, during a Saturday meeting of the Covid task force, Fauci and Navarro sparred over the promotion of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for Covid. Navarro was strongly in favor of advocating the drug’s use, but Fauci had already disparaged the use of hydroxychloroquine during a March 20th press conference - and he would do so again.
According to accounts of the meeting Navarro began passing out studies touting the drug’s effectiveness. Fauci pushed back, claiming there was only anecdotal evidence that hydroxychloroquine worked against the coronavirus. Apparently, things got contentious. Navarro was right. And Fauci was later proven wrong. Even the NIH now admits that hydroxychloroquine can be effective as a treatment for Covid. But that didn’t stop the media from ridiculing Trump at the time - even as Fauci actively undercut him.
On Monday, April 6th, following the confrontation with Fauci, Navarro’s memos were suddenly leaked to both Axios and the New York Times - and they were portrayed by the media as internal warnings that Trump had ignored. Unfortunately for Trump, Navarro’s memos had been held up at the National Security Council level and never made their way to Trump.
Simultaneously with the suspicious memo leak, the Inspector General for the Department of Health and Human Services abruptly issued an unexpected report that described a dire situation for hospitals, front-line doctors and medical staff. This report had a likely target - Peter Navarro - who had recently assumed responsibility for supply chain issues within the medical system. The media attacked Navarro and the Trump Administration for a problem that didn’t exist. The timing of these events - coming directly after Fauci’s confrontation with Navarro - raise obvious questions as to their source. The battles continued.
The very next day, on April 7th, Trump sent a tweet stating “The WHO really blew it” and said he would be looking into their actions. Trump was right. The first WHO report claimed that “COVID-19 is a zoonotic virus” – a natural virus that jumped from animals to humans at the Wuhan seafood market. The possibility of a lab leak wasn’t even mentioned. It was a fabrication designed to appease China. It also aligned with Fauci’s narrative.
On the same day, acting DNI Rick Grenell “convened a review of intelligence officials on April 7 to see whether the agencies could reach a consensus. The officials determined that at least so far, they could not.” It’s unclear if Trump’s tweet prompted the sudden review, but the word “consensus” is important. Because, as we noted earlier, the FBI was already aware a lab leak was likely and was actively investigating EcoHealth in real time.
Although the Intelligence Community refused to provide a consensus opinion, Trump began to hint more strongly at a leak from the Wuhan Lab. Indeed, on April 15th, 2020, in response to a question from John Roberts, Trump seemed to suggest that Covid had indeed come from a Chinese Lab.
Trump’s comments contrasted with the public position of his military officials. On April 14th, Joint Chiefs Mark Milley told reporters that “I would just say at this point it's inconclusive, although the weight of evidence seems to indicate natural." Two days later Defense Secretary Mark Esper told NBC that “A majority of the views right now is that it is natural, that it was organic.” The media would use the statements by his military officials to undercut Trump’s statements.
Undeterred, Trump would continue to make public statements that he believed Covid came from a lab leak, but Fauci was about to push back. On April 17th, Trump told reporters that in regards to a lab leak, “We’re looking at it, a lot of people are looking at it. It seems to make sense. … There is a lot of investigation going on and we’re going to find out." But Fauci suddenly jumped into the conversation, claiming that Covid had a natural origin - and citing the fraudulent Proximal Origin paper as proof of his claim. Fauci even pretended that he didn’t know who the authors were - despite having directed them to write it. It was a crucially deceptive moment in the creation of the Natural Origin narrative.
Despite Fauci’s public deception, or perhaps because of it, Trump abruptly cut all funding to EcoHealth on April 26, 2020. But Fauci undercut Trump a few months later by quietly providing a whole new level of funding to EcoHealth. Against this dueling backdrop, another crucial event occurred. An April 28, 2020, article reported on the previously mentioned State Department memo, noting that “A Wuhan laboratory is the “most likely” source of the COVID-19 outbreak, according to a U.S. government analysis.” The article also included direct quotes from the then non-public State Department memo.
The article should have discredited the Natural Origin Narrative before it took hold. But that possibility was almost immediately derailed by the Intelligence Community who seemingly rushed to counter reporting of the State Department memo. In an April 29, 2020 email Acting DNI Grenell discussed the pending statement, asking “who is writing the IC wide statement that [REDACTED] suggested we do in the oval?” “We agreed to write a statement for the IC to all sign and it would say we are down to two options for Covid.”
We don’t yet know who suggested that the statement be written but we do know that it was formally issued the next day. On April 30, 2020, the DNI’s office issued an Intelligence Community statement on the Origins of Covid - which made the crucial claim that "The Intelligence Community concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not man-made or genetically modified." The Intelligence Community’s statement was used to push back on any and all Lab Leak theories - just as the Intelligence Community knew it would be.
The statement by the Intelligence Community completely buried any further reporting on the State Department analysis. But it’s also worth noting that the report was total fiction. There was no widespread scientific consensus at that time. And we now have proof that Covid was both man-made and genetically modified. But at the time, the IC’s statement worked. Indeed, more than a year later a follow-up August 2021 Intelligence Community report still promoted a Natural Origin. But there was another problem as well.
It appears that nobody, including Grenell, told Trump the Intelligence Community’s assessment was coming or what it would say. We know this because Trump appeared to have been totally blinded-sided by its release during a live press conference on the evening of April 30th. Trump had been building towards a definitive statement on a Lab Leak - and it almost appeared that someone knew in advance what Trump intended to say and had taken steps to counter him.
Despite media ridicule, towards the end of the clip Trump did confirm that he’d personally seen evidence that Covid originated at the Wuhan lab. But his claims were totally discredited by the Intelligence Community statement and the media had a field day. The media would continue to use the Intelligence Community statement as proof that Covid had a natural origin. It’s possible that Grenell was tricked by the Intelligence Community or was simply naive regarding the impact from the language in the statement, but we struggle to explain why Trump was left exposed and unprepared for its release.
This was the moment Fauci was waiting for. During a lengthy, and splashy May 4th Interview with National Geographic, Fauci claimed there was “No scientific evidence the coronavirus was made in a Chinese lab.” Fauci told National Geographic that Covid “could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated… everything strongly indicates that [the virus] evolved in nature.” Fauci even dismissed the idea of an accidental escape from a lab. Notably, just three months earlier four NIH-funded scientists privately told Fauci the virus almost certainly came from a lab.
Rather than investigate Trump’s claims, the media celebrated Fauci for “standing up” to Trump. Although Trump has been vindicated and most view Fauci as a fraud, Fauci’s subterfuge worked at the time. It became almost impossible to discuss any theory that deviated from a Natural Origin. Scientists bent the knee to Fauci and the deep pockets of the NIH. Trump was castigated by the media. Censorship was rampant. And the DNI’s Intelligence Community statement on the Origins of Covid helped to make it all possible.