Government watchdog Judicial Watch has received five pages of records from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) that reveal an April 2020 exchange with officials in the bureau’s Newark Field Office referring to Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China as including “gain-of-function research” which “would leave no signature of purposeful human manipulation.”

On April 23, 2020, an email exchange with the subject “Follow-up call” occurred between unnamed FBI officials. A person whose name is redacted writes:

Details of the current NIAID [Fauci’s National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases] grant for WIV [Wuhan Institute of Virology] bat coronavirus surveillance and WIV bat coronavirus gain-of-function research are available at:https://projectreporter.nih.gov/project_info_description.cfm?aid=9819304&icde=49645421&ddparam=&ddvalue=&ddsub=&cr=1&csb=default&cs=ASC&pball= [summary of NIH grant to EcoHealth Alliance for Project 2R01AI110964-06]. The key activity for bat coronavirus surveillance is ‘Aim 1 … We will sequence receptor binding domains (spike proteins) to identify viruses with the highest potential for spillover which we will include in our experimental investigations. (Aim 3).’

The key activity for bat coronavirus gain of function is “Aim 3 … We will use S protein sequence data, infectious clone technology, in vitro and in vivo infection experiments and analysis of receptor binding to test the hypothesis that 0/0 divergence thresholds in S protein sequences predict spillover potential.” Translated into lay language, this equates to: “In Aim 3, we will use de novo synthesis to construct novel viruses encoding different spike proteins in an otherwise-constant genomic context, and we will test the ability of the resulting novel viruses to infect human cells in culture and to infect laboratory animals. We hypothesize that there is a direct correlation between the receptor binding affinity of the spike protein and the abilities to infect human cells in culture and to infect laboratory animals. We will test this hypothesis by asking whether novel viruses encoding spike proteins with the highest receptor-binding affinity have the highest abilities to infect human cells in culture and to infect laboratory animals.”

The reason I am writing is that the experimental strategy proposed in Aim 3 (“infectious clone technology”), if performed using commercial or in-house gene synthesis to prepare the infectious clones, *** would leave no signatures of purposeful human manipulation***. [Emphasis added]

A colleague then replies, “Hey, are you going to be in the office tomorrow? We just interviewed our person from [redacted] again, and he provided us with some alarming new info. Give me [a] call if you can.”

The email thread was then forwarded by the Newark Office Assistant Special Agent in Charge-National Security Branch (ASAC-NSB), whose name is redacted, to the then-special agent in charge of the Newark Field Office, Gregory Ehrie.

“These smoking gun documents showed the FBI quickly understood that Fauci’s agency funded the gain-of-function research that could disguise the resulting coronavirus as ‘natural,’” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “These new documents further demonstrate the need for a comprehensive criminal investigation into Fauci’s gain-of-function scandal.”