Anthony Fauci may or may not get what’s coming to him in this life. But either way, it won’t have been for lack of effort on the part of Dr. Rand Paul.

Paul, the junior senator from Kentucky, has been an absolute thorn in Fauci’s side, having seen through the diminutive doc a long time ago, when most Americans were still under his spell regarding the COVID-19 pandemic.

Paul accused Fauci of having lied to Congress at a Senate hearing more than two years ago, calling out his testimony from May 11, 2021, when he said that “the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

“Dr. Fauci,” Paul began at a subsequent hearing in July 2021, “knowing that it is a crime to lie to Congress, do you wish to retract your statement of May 11, where you claimed that the NIH never funded gains-of-function research in Wuhan?”

To which Fauci replied: “I have never lied before the Congress, and I do not retract that statement. You do not know what you are talking about quite frankly and I want to say that officially.”

But as it turns out, Senator Paul knew exactly what he was talking about. And a trove of documents that were released in September 2021 following a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by The Intercept proved it.

Earlier this week, Paul took the extraordinary step of referring Fauci to the Justice Department for investigation into possible criminal prosecution for that alleged lie. As Fox News reports:

In a letter to District of Columbia U.S. Attorney Matthew Graves, the Kentucky Republican requested that the DOJ investigate whether the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which is a part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), broke the law with false statements made in congressional testimony under a statute punishable by time in federal prison.

“Before Congress,” Paul wrote in his referral letter, “Dr. Fauci denied funding gain-of-function research, to the press he claims to have a dispassionate view on the lab leak hypothesis, and in private he acknowledges gain-of-function research at WIV (Wuhan Institute of Virology) to his colleagues.”

It would seem hard to reconcile those differences.

Paul provided a smoking gun of sorts on July 29 when he shared an incriminating email from Fauci to his colleagues, saying: “This directly contradicts everything he said in committee hearing to me, denying absolutely that they funded any gain of function, and it’s absolutely a lie. That’s why I sent an official criminal referral to the DOJ.”

Yesterday, Paul went even further, saying, “I don’t think there’s ever been a clearer case of perjury in the history of government testimony, and I don’t say that lightly.”

Paul continued: “He said adamantly that the government never funded this gain-of-function research. We now have the Government Accountability Office, the GAO, has admitted that the funding came from the NIH. We have the acting director [Lawrence] Tabak, of the NIH, admitting it in writing that it came from the NIH. But now we have, really, the smoking gun, and that is Fauci in private saying the opposite of what he was saying in public when he was publicly telling me that absolutely, we do not fund gain-of-function research in China.”

Paul’s case against Fauci appears strong and damning, but Washington, DC, is, sadly, a rigged town — a town where Republicans get prosecuted and Democrats don’t. “We have an incredibly partisan Attorney General [Merrick] Garland, who is refusing to act,” said Paul, “so I’ve taken the extraordinary step of actually going to the local U.S. attorney in DC to see if he will act. The problem is there are partisans littered throughout the legal system, and people are seeing this. You don’t get prosecuted if you’re a Democrat under this administration, no matter what you do.”

Again, time will tell if Anthony Fauci is ever held accountable for misleading Congress and the American people about the origins of a pandemic that killed more than a million of his countrymen. But it won’t have been for lack of effort on the part of Senator Rand Paul.