he Counterlawfare Institute obtained a previously undisclosed June 8, 2025, memo laying out a blueprint for the Department of Justice to investigate Anthony Fauci and the National Institutes of Health’s contributions toward the influential “Proximal Origin” scientific paper that argued the Covid-19 virus originated from nature, not a lab.
The memorandum was written by Michael Caputo, a former senior Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) official who later served as an adviser in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, and addressed to Ed Martin, then director of the Department of Justice’s Weaponization Working Group. It later emerged that Caputo was under secret federal surveillance at the time.
In the memo, Caputo encourages the DOJ to investigate whether federal officials misled U.S. intelligence and directed millions of taxpayer dollars to scientists who “falsely distracted the public from government misconduct that lead to massive illness and deaths worldwide.”
The administration later imposed financial consequences on the paper’s publisher, suggesting that at least some action followed. Some recent revelations from Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., may also trace back to this effort. But what became of the broader investigation, whether it was formally opened, remains active, or was allowed to lapse, is unknown.
HHS Weaponization
The memo lays out an investigation into whether Fauci, then-director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and other federal officials manipulated government power, scientific opinion, official data, taxpayer funding, and intelligence agencies to misdirect the Covid pandemic response, conceal the American government’s possible responsibility for the emergence of Covid, and mislead the public about the origin of the virus.
The memo explicitly contemplates “sufficient evidence of misconduct and a likelihood of prosecution,” while calling for the victims whose careers and reputations have been destroyed to be identified and made whole. It notes that National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya had a team working on a briefing.
Whether the newly unearthed Fauci diaries emerged from that effort is not yet known. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said that it took officials “about eight months to dig these out of 11 separate servers, where they had been sequestered and secreted.” Most significantly, the memo identifies the publication of “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” paper not as an isolated scientific failure, but as the opening move in what the memo described as a “curated misinformation effort.”
Fauci’s Central Role
The memo places Fauci at the center of the “Proximal Origin” operation, pointing to his role in the paper’s development and later promotion. As the memo notes, the paper’s authors sought extensive input from Fauci, his boss, then-NIH Director Francis Collins, and others while developing the paper. Fauci worked hand in glove with them as their private suspicions of a laboratory origin were transformed into a publication purporting to dismiss that very possibility.
Then, on April 17, 2020, Fauci stood beside President Trump at the White House podium and presented the paper as the independent work of scientists with whom he claimed no familiarity. He said that he did not have the authors’ names in front of him and conveyed the impression that he did not know who they were. That was false.
Fauci knew exactly who the authors were. He had worked closely with them as the paper was developed. He knew what they had initially believed, how their conclusions had changed, and the extent of his own involvement in producing the scientific authority he was now presenting to the country as independent.
The deception therefore operated on two levels. First, Fauci worked with the authors to produce a paper dismissing a laboratory origin. Then, just as the memo described, he promoted that paper from the White House as outside validation of the government’s position, while concealing his own role in its creation.
The government helped create the scientific authority that protected it from scrutiny, then pointed to that authority as proof that independent experts had vindicated it.
Hellbound and Down 