Turns Out 'Trust the Science' Came With Receipts

Greetings and welcome to Sunday, June 21, 2026. Today is Father’s Day. Today is also the summer solstice, the longest day of the year in terms of sunrise to sunset. It’s also National Skateboarding Day, National Yoga Day, National Smoothie Day, National Peaches ’n’ Cream Day, and National Cookie Dough Day.

Today in History: 

1547: Great fire in Moscow, a third of the largely wooden city destroyed and 2,000–3,000 killed.

1675: Foundation stone for St. Paul’s Cathedral in London is laid.

1768: The first medical diploma in America is granted to Dr. John Archer by the College of Philadelphia.

1788: U.S. Constitution comes into effect when New Hampshire becomes the ninth state to ratify it.

1834: American inventor and businessman Cyrus McCormick patents the reaping machine.

1879: Frank Winfield Woolworth opens his first successful “Woolworth’s Great Five Cent Store” on North Queen Street, Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

1939: The New York Yankees announce Lou Gehrig’s retirement after doctors reveal he has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).

1948: Columbia Records unveils the 33⅓ rpm LP phonograph record, invented by Peter Carl Goldmark, at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City; over the next decade, its popularity and profitability help push the 78 rpm record out of production.

1969: Zager & Evans release “In the Year 2525.”

1975: British rock guitarist Ritchie Blackmore quits Deep Purple and forms Rainbow.

If today is your day also, have a great day!

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Tulsi Gabbard’s last day as the director of national intelligence is upon us, after she resigned because of a major illness in the family. In her resignation note to the president, she cited her husband Abraham Williams’ recent diagnosis with sacral chordoma — an extremely rare tumor that develops in the sacrum at the base of the spine. In her resignation, she wrote that "He faces major challenges in the coming weeks and months. At this time, I must step away from public service to be by his side and fully support him through this battle."

That said, there is good news there. The surgery to remove bone and surrounding tissue lasted almost seven hours and was described as successful. Gabbard shared that he had a rough night following that surgery and was in a lot of pain, but was finally home resting, adding "Now recovery begins."

Gabbard also expressed gratitude for the public support: "We're so grateful for the outpouring of prayers and kind messages from all of you. Our hearts are full."

As wonderful as that news is, and as cheered as I am about it, alas! That’s where the feel-good part of this piece ends.

As the exit sign looms, Gabbard has released the following statement:

Today, on my final day as Director of National Intelligence, I’m releasing never-before-seen communications and documents exposing how Dr. Fauci provided millions in US taxpayer dollars to fund dangerous gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab, worked with politicized elements… pic.twitter.com/ZMdliW4zyS

— DNI Tulsi Gabbard (@DNIGabbard) June 19, 2026

And here are the documents she declassified and released:

COVID-19 Release Index
COVID-19 Release Part 1
COVID-19 Release Part 2
COVID-19 Release Part 3
COVID-19 Release Part 4 

The ODNI press release accompanying the release states that Anthony Fauci, as head of NIAID, 

provided millions in U.S. taxpayer dollars to fund gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology — work the release describes as “widely viewed” as the source of an unintentional lab leak.

I spent some time last night — several hours in fact — going over these documents that I’ve linked above. They lay out the flat-out accusations of Fauci of teaming up with his fellow travelers in the Intelligence Community to kill the lab-leak hypothesis and bury his own fingerprints on the research funding.

And apparently that wasn’t enough — these documents show three specific roles for him:

• Fauci caused our government to bankroll reckless and illegal gain-of-function experiments on bat coronaviruses in Wuhan while chasing the trillion-dollar dream of "universal vaccines," an item worth billions to Big Pharma; 
• Fauci worked the phones behind the scenes to steer IC analysts toward a convenient (and false) natural-origin conclusion; 
• Fauci then stood in front of cameras playing the part of America's trusted pandemic czar and — per the release — fed the public a steady diet of lies, disinformation, and censorship.

Quite the résumé, wouldn't you say? But wait, there's more!

Testimony gathered during the declassification review includes accounts of a contractor who was terminated shortly after coming forward as a whistleblower, analysts being told that advocacy for the lab-leak hypothesis would affect promotions, and senior leaders allegedly removing anonymity from the whistleblower complaint process by requiring managers or attorneys to be present at ODNI meetings. These accounts have been referred to the IC Inspector General. No action has been taken yet.

The evidence collected in these documents, in my view, creates as damning a picture of Fauci as one could possibly imagine. All of this goes directly to what I've been feeling —  and saying —  for a long, long time. 

Remember Fauci getting up on his hind legs in a CNN interview, after Trump won the election but before he had even taken the oath, saying that Trump would face a pandemic?

How would he know? Because as the evidence in hand shows, he directed and financed it, with our tax dollars.

Remember the old saying? When you're up to your belt loops in alligators, it's hard to remember that your original mission was to drain the swamp. And draining the swamp, you'll recall, stood at the very center of Trump’s campaign. How convenient!

The more I look at all of this, the more it resembles the “insurance policy” crowd’s backup plan — the one Peter Strzok and Lisa Page seemed so eager to discuss in those now-infamous texts about stopping Trump. They lost the election, but it appears they never abandoned the objective. They simply moved to Plan B. More pointedly and succinctly: was the lab leak unintentional?

When COVID-19 first emerged, I couldn’t point to much beyond instinct. Still, my gut kept telling me these events were connected in ways the public, including myself, didn’t fully understand yet. Understand: COVID-19 is a real, if artificially created virus, but politics quickly became the real and overriding story.

Every instinct I have tells me that this was a coup, in every sense of the word. No tanks rolled down Pennsylvania Avenue. No soldiers stormed government buildings. Instead, fear, censorship, bureaucratic power, and economic devastation achieved what normal politics could not, and no army could get close to.

Yes, people died, in numbers that dwarf the actions of every dictator in history. Millions of them. The elderly, the vulnerable, and those already struggling with poor health paid the highest price. Estimates place the worldwide death toll in the tens of millions. The scale of the tragedy remains almost impossible for us to comprehend.

Fauci’s legacy won’t consist of magazine covers or glowing media profiles that he so eagerly sought as he basked in celebrity status, collected accolades, posed for photographs, and lectured the public from television screens. His legacy will consist of elderly parents and grandparents dying alone in nursing homes. Families who lost final conversations, final embraces, and final goodbyes. Bureaucrats locked relatives out while infected patients were crammed into those same facilities. My own mother became one of those stories. I do not seek sympathy here; I merely hold out personal experience as an example. Certainly, millions of families will forever carry similar scars.

Did the people driving these policies lose sleep over these deadly consequences? Nothing I’ve seen suggests they did. After all, the suffering served the agenda. The collateral damage barely registered. The machine kept moving.

Am I being harsh? Yes. Absolutely. I understand that. In fact, this deserves more harshness, but I don’t have the words to describe all this without pushing my editors over the edge.

The accusations carry enormous weight, and I fully understand exactly how serious they are. But after watching these same people distort facts, weaponize institutions, silence dissent, and excuse one abuse after another for the better part of a decade — and beyond — all aimed at one solitary goal, a fair question remains:

Would you really put it past them?

All that’s left is jail time for the guilty. Given the timing of this release, and the lack of prosecutions thus far, I wonder if we will ever see that day. That, perhaps, is the most damning point in all of this.

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Take care today, and I'll see you tomorrow.