The Covid Cover-Up Ran Through Xavier Becerra’s Office

Truth Based Media ^ | June 20, 2026 | Isaac Graham

[Red Badger]

California Democrats just handed their gubernatorial nomination to a man whose pandemic-era résumé includes a role the party would prefer voters never examine: he was the place where the truth about COVID-19’s origins was sent to be quietly buried.

That is the picture that emerges from the trove of records Tulsi Gabbard declassified on her way out the door as Director of National Intelligence. Among the documents her office released on June 18 is correspondence describing how a whistleblower complaint, one alleging that the Intelligence Community believed COVID escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and that Dr. Anthony Fauci had misled Congress about it, was routed away from an independent watchdog and onto the desk of then-Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, the very official to whom Fauci answered.

An August 19, 2021 letter from ODNI General Counsel Chris Fonzone to Gabbard’s Biden-era predecessor, Avril Haines, lays out the maneuver in the bloodless prose of government memos. Reviewers concluded the complaint concerned exchanges between Fauci and Sen. Rand Paul, in which Fauci had insisted, under direct questioning, that “the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain of function research in the Wuhan Institute.”

Paul gave him the chance to retract it. He refused. Then came the decisive sentence in the Fonzone memo.

We’ve thus updated the draft letter to note this point and to refer the complaint to Secretary Becerra, rather than the HHS IG.

Strip away the passive voice and the meaning is unmistakable. A complaint accusing Fauci of lying to the Senate was not handed to the HHS Inspector General, the office built to investigate precisely that kind of allegation. It was handed to Fauci’s own boss. The watchdog was bypassed in favor of the man with every institutional incentive to make the problem disappear.

And disappear it did. Whatever passed for Becerra’s review of the matter produced no reckoning for Fauci. It generated instead the debarment of EcoHealth Alliance and its president, Peter Daszak, the conduit through which NIH money reached the Wuhan lab. Daszak was cut off from federal funding for five years. He was the offering. Fauci, by contrast, walked away untouched, having later collected a preemptive pardon signed by Joe Biden’s autopen against any future liability.

Had that whistleblower been allowed to testify, the entire arc of the COVID story might have bent in a different direction, toward accountability rather than the years of credentialed obfuscation Americans were instead asked to swallow. The implications would have reached well beyond one bureaucrat’s reputation, touching the question of what Washington knew about a Chinese laboratory and when it knew it. Instead, the inconvenient account went to Becerra’s office and was never heard from again.

A Second Front Becerra Cannot Ignore

This arrives at an awkward moment for a candidate already fending off a corruption scandal that has swallowed his closest aide. Becerra’s longtime chief of staff, Sean McCluskie, pleaded guilty to a scheme that siphoned roughly $225,000 from one of Becerra’s dormant campaign accounts.

His alleged co-conspirator, Dana Williamson, who served as Gavin Newsom’s chief of staff and once ran Becerra’s attorney general campaign, was hit with a 23-count federal indictment. Prosecutors say the money was funneled through shell billing to pad McCluskie’s pay after he followed Becerra to Washington.

Becerra has not been charged, and court filings indicate he was not aware of the scheme. He has called the accusations a gut punch and says he cooperated with the Justice Department. Fair enough. But a candidate whose inner circle is under federal scrutiny on one side, and whose pandemic record now reads like a study in how to make a whistleblower vanish on the other, is not a man Californians should hand the keys to the nation’s largest state without hard questions.

Scripture is blunt about where this kind of thing ends. “Be sure your sin will find you out,” Moses warned the tribes of Israel, and the warning has not lost its force across the centuries. Buried truths have a way of clawing back to the surface, often at the least convenient hour, which for Becerra would be the stretch of a campaign meant to carry him to Sacramento.

Becerra has so far declined to address the declassified record. He should. The documents do not merely place him near the cover-up. They suggest the cover-up ran through him. And if that is where the paper trail leads, he may want to hope there is still a little cash left in that dormant account, because he is going to need the lawyers.

---

TOPICS: Business/Economy; Conspiracy; Government; Health/Medicine
KEYWORDS:

[SaveFerris]

Nuremberg II

[DIRTYSECRET]

Doesn’t matter he’ll win. Do you think the people care?

[CondoleezzaProtege]

The other Democrats were preferable. Not Tom Steyer (though he’s better than Becerra too) but the Mayor of San Jose, blanking on his name. He was moderate by CA standards. The worst possible one “won” of course.

[Pete from Shawnee Mission]

He was in charge of shipping all the illegals around the country on those 2 Am plane flights.

[rktman]

BOOM! Shoe in for the gov mansion now.