Senator Rand Paul said Tuesday night that he would be sending a criminal referral letter to the Department of Justice about Dr. Anthony Fauci accusing the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases of lying to Congress.

Paul — an ardent critic of the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control — told Sean Hannity that Fauci’s previous sworn testimony about gain of function research in Wuhan of the CoVid-19 virus was a blatant lie and he was sending a criminal referral letter to the Department of Justice.

Sen. Paul said medical experts who have differing opinions than Dr. Fauci regarding COVID-19 won’t go public with their dissent fearing that it will affect their funding.

“He’s been there for 40 years, probably 39 years too long, but he controls all the funding, so people are deathly afraid of him,” Paul told Hannity.

“I get letters from scientists all the time. You can find them. They’re very distrustful of what he’s saying,” Paul said.

“They don’t think he’s making sense. They don’t think he’s reading the science accurately, but they’re afraid to speak out because many of them are university scientists and they depend on NIH [National Institutes of Health] funds, and to cross him means it’s the last money you’ll ever get.”

At issue is whether Fauci lied to Congress over the “gain of function” research being conducted on the Covid-19 virus in the Wuhan lab.

Paul accused Fauci at a Senate hearing on Tuesday of obfuscating the truth, a charge which Fauci denied, saying “I want everyone to understand that if you look at those viruses, and that’s judged by qualified virologists and evolutionary biologists, those viruses are molecularly impossible to result in SARS-COVID-2.”

Paul first addressed to Fauci Tuesday saying that it “is a crime to lie to congress.” Paul went on, “On your last trip to our committee, on May 11, you stated that the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain of function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. And yet, gain of function research was done entirely in the Wuhan Institute by Dr. Shi, and was funded by the NIH.”

Paul entered a paper by Dr. Shi into the record, which outlines Shi’s research. Paul describes the paper as “gain of function”, and notes the amount of funding from the NIH and praises the NIH for having granted these funds for her research. Shi “took two bat coronavirus genes, spike genes, and combined them with a SARS related backbone to create new viruses that are not found in nature. The lab created viruses were then shown to replicate in humans,” Paul read.