It sounds like a bad joke. Our nation’s federal government employs some four million people, and the highest-paid person among them is Dr. Anthony Fauci.

So we wonder: Has this guy ever had a performance review?

More than 3,200 pages of Fauci’s emails are now public, having been obtained by BuzzFeed News through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. They cover the Not-So-Good Doctor’s communications with all manner of correspondents during the period from January to June 2020, and they give us a glimpse into how Fauci handled his job. They also further degrade his reputation as the nation’s leading expert on infectious diseases — and, even more than that, his reputation for honesty and integrity.

Former Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows made a key point, saying, “Part of the troubling thing [with the emails] is, not only do they seem to correspond with what President Trump said and what Secretary [of State Mike] Pompeo said in terms of the origins of the virus, but it indicates that Dr. Fauci had knowledge, or at least a suspicion, of things not happening in an evolutionary manner very early on, and he didn’t share that.”

Was Fauci intentionally withholding this information? It sure seems so. Recall that Donald Trump routinely and correctly called COVID-19 “the China Virus,” and he went on record more than a year ago with “a high degree of confidence” that COVID-19 came from a Chinese lab.

Didn’t Fauci have a duty to present the president’s side of the story, especially in the face of a Trump-deranged mainstream media and Big Tech oligarchy — both of which we now know actively suppressed evidence that supported the president’s public statements on the lab-leak theory?

And then there was Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, who was regularly mocked by CNN and its ilk for having shared his spot-on instincts about the ChiComs as early as January 2020. If anyone deserves a commendation and an apology, it’s Tom Cotton.

The release of Fauci’s emails is thus one more piece in a mosaic of COVID-19 malfeasance by Big Tech, Beltway bureaucrats, and our fundamentally dishonest media. The scandal — and it is a scandal — was neatly captured by Republican Congressman Steve Scalise in a single tweet: “Big Tech was censoring posts about the Wuhan lab leak. The media was calling people who talked about the Wuhan lab leak conspiracy theorists. All while Fauci himself was emailing about COVID-19 possibly leaking from the Wuhan lab. Let that sink in.”

When it comes to holding Fauci accountable, though, no one beats Kentucky Senator Rand Paul — either for early and sustained assault or for terseness: “Told you,” he tweeted yesterday. As Fox News reports:

Paul has repeatedly criticized Fauci on social media and in interviews for his comments on herd immunity, wearing masks … and his dismissal of a theory suggesting COVID-19 may have originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. … Paul has also condemned Fauci’s claim made during a May 25 congressional hearing that a $600,000 federal grant from NIAID did not directly fund the lab’s gain-of-function research, which is research that involves modifying a virus to make it more infectious among humans.

And so, Fauci, the 80-year-old bureaucrat who even today is being hailed by Democrat dead-enders and their media trucklings as “a rare source of frank honesty within the Trump administration’s COVID-19 task force,” has once again been exposed — and this time by his own words.

As the Washington Examiner reports, those words include an April 2020 exchange with a man named Peter Daszak, “the president of EcoHealth Alliance, a research group that secured a grant to perform coronavirus research in Wuhan before the pandemic, wrote to Fauci ‘to say a personal thank you on behalf of our staff and collaborators’ after Fauci dismissed the idea that the pandemic started due to a lab accident in Wuhan.”

Was Daszak’s research of the highly dangerous gain-of-function variety? Inquiring minds want to know.

What we do know is that Daszak was selected to be part of the World Health Organization’s sham probe into the origins of COVID, where he continued to push the increasingly implausible wet market theory.

One of the more outrageous revelations from the Fauci email trove concerns a different kind of neglect. As the Washington Free Beacon reports, “‘Too long for me to read,’ Fauci wrote in response to a March 2020 email from a physicist with extensive experience in China, or ‘tl;dr,’ as the kids say. The expert had reached out to express concern about ‘fabricated data’ coming out of China and the communist country’s other efforts to conceal the true extent of the virus.”

Thus, much of what we now know about Anthony Fauci’s role in the most consequential event since 9/11 can be summed up in two acronyms: TLDR and TDS. Fauci didn’t read a crucial email because, in his words, it was too long for him to read. And Fauci also failed to tell the whole truth about what he knew concerning COVID-19’s origins, perhaps because he didn’t want to damage his standing among his admirers, many of whom were (and still are) suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome.

As the Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro sums it up, “The Fauci emails just show that Fauci consistently took the path of least resistance: downplaying the Wuhan lab leak theory, flip-flopping on masking, militantly fighting Rand Paul over post-covid immunity even though he knew better (Paul was right). Fauci wasn’t following science as a primary goal. He was a bureaucratic institutionalist, which is precisely what you would expect from a career bureaucrat. Which is why it was insane for the media to saint him as a groundbreaking truthteller just to spite Trump.”