The recent discovery of Anthony Fauci’s phone and electronic devices from his time as Covid tsar represents a “great breakthrough” in the congressional investigation into his handling of the pandemic and the origins of the disease that killed more than 7.1 million people worldwide, the director of the FBI, Kash Patel, said last week.

During an appearance on “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast that featured Mr. Patel speaking with Mr. Rogan while smoking a cigar, the FBI director disclosed that the devices had been found two days earlier and had been handed over to Senator Paul, a Republican of Kentucky. 

“At least we found it, and at least we can tell the American people we’ve been looking because it is of public importance to figure out, did this guy lie? Did he intentionally mislead the world and cause countless deaths? We owe those answers to the American people,” Mr. Patel said. 

Perhaps knowing better following the blowback both he and the FBI’s deputy director, Daniel Bongino, received for confirming that a disgraced financier, Jeffrey Epstein, killed himself in prison, Mr. Patel cautioned Mr. Rogan’s audience not to get too excited about what, if anything, will be found on Dr. Fauci’s devices. 

“Look, your audience and everybody listening shouldn’t jump to the conclusion [that] everything’s in there,” Mr. Patel said. “Maybe it’s deleted, maybe it’s not, but at least now we can tell people that we have been looking because it is of public importance.”

The litigation counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance,  Jenin Younes, said she is equally cautious about what could be found on the devices. She serves as the leading attorney in multiple lawsuits against Dr. Fauci, including Murthy vs. Missouri. That case accused Dr. Fauci and other government officials of coordinating social media censorship on dissenting viewpoints on Covid policies.

“We do have strong ground for believing that Dr. Fauci was involved in covering up the lab leak theory, so if he was careless enough to talk about it on recordings or in conversations that were recorded, which he might have been, because he certainly did over email, then there could be very interesting information on [these devices],” Ms. Younes said in an interview with The New York Sun. 

President Biden, prior to leaving office, gave Dr. Fauci a preemptive pardon, a move that President Trump described as “disgraceful.” In February, a multi-state coalition of attorneys general, led by Alan Wilson of South Carolina, demanded “accountability” for Dr. Fauci’s actions during the pandemic and to look into potential violations at the state level.

“There is absolutely no basis for these threats. Let me be perfectly clear: I have committed no crime and there are no possible grounds for any allegation or threat of criminal investigation or prosecution of me,” Dr. Fauci said in a statement in January. 

Congressional investigations found that Dr. Fauci and other high-ranking health officials, such as a former National Institutes of Health director, Francis Collins, were involved in prompting or encouraging scientists to draft the “Proximal Origin” paper that downplayed the “lab leak theory.” That theory posited that the disease originated from a research lab in Wuhan, China, and not from a Wuhan wet market.

Other controversies surrounding Dr. Fauci’s tenure as Covid tsar, like the use of private Gmail accounts as a back channel for secretive communications by a Fauci adviser, David Morens, and Dr. Morens’s recommendation to have emails sent to Dr. Fauci’s private email to avoid requests under the Freedom of Information Act, may give his critics hope that there may be more damning evidence on his electronic devices. 

“My hypothesis, and I think a lot of people share it, is that they were concerned that they would be blamed, whether fairly or not, for Covid emerging because they were funding gain-of-function research, so they were trying to sort of distance themselves in various ways,” Ms. Younes told the Sun.