In February 2021, Customs and Border Protection agents were ready. Peter Daszak — president of EcoHealth Alliance and the man who funneled American taxpayer dollars to the Wuhan Institute of Virology — was about to land in New York. CBP had questions prepared about his contacts at the Wuhan lab, whether he collected or transported biological samples, and what happened during his trip to China.
The FBI told them not to ask.
Senate Homeland Security Chairman Rand Paul released database records Sunday showing the Bureau intervened days before Daszak landed, ordering CBP not to question him. The inspection never took place. The records are now publicly available in a "Reading Room" database on Paul's Senate website, part of his ongoing COVID-19 pandemic origin probe, as reported by Just The News.
Let's be clear about what this means. We're not talking about bureaucratic incompetence or agencies failing to coordinate. The FBI actively blocked a border interview with a man whose organization had direct financial ties to the lab most credible investigators believe leaked a virus that killed over a million Americans. That's not a missed call. That's a deliberate decision.
Daszak wasn't some random traveler. EcoHealth Alliance, under his leadership, served as the middleman between Dr. Anthony Fauci's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The grants, the gain-of-function research, the entire pipeline that made Wuhan's bat coronavirus work possible — Daszak sat at the center of it. CBP knew that. The FBI knew that too, which is exactly why they shut the interview down.
The timing matters. This happened while the "lab leak theory" was still being treated as misinformation by every major platform and most of the legacy media. Facebook was banning people for saying it. Scientists who raised questions were being professionally destroyed. And the FBI — the agency that was supposed to be investigating the origins of the worst pandemic in a century — was running interference so the one guy who could answer real questions about Wuhan never had to face them at the border.
Paul's release comes as Fauci himself is scheduled to testify before the Senate Homeland Security Committee regarding statements he made to Congress about pandemic origins. That testimony is expected within the week.
The FBI's position, to the extent they've offered one, has been that their own investigation into COVID origins was ongoing and they didn't want other agencies interfering. That might hold water if the Bureau had actually produced results. Instead, their internal assessment eventually leaned toward a lab origin — and then they buried it under layers of classified caveats while publicly saying the matter was inconclusive.
So the agency that blocked CBP from asking Daszak about biological samples from Wuhan also couldn't manage to tell the American public what its own analysts concluded. One agency wanted answers. Another agency made sure they never got them.
Fauci's upcoming testimony now carries a different weight. The question was always whether he misled Congress about gain-of-function funding. Now there's a second question: did the FBI coordinate with anyone inside NIH or EcoHealth to ensure Daszak's border crossing went unexamined?
The records don't answer that yet. But the records do exist, they're public, and they show one thing with certainty — when America's border agents had a chance to ask hard questions about the origins of a global pandemic, the FBI picked up the phone and said no.