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It seems very unlikely to me that a knowledgeable head of an NIH institute would break the law in a discoverable way. My guess is that when this occurred, the decision-makers did not believe they were doing anything illegal.
(I think NIH funding virology research in China is dumb. That should not have happened.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
(This is not about NIH or GOF - it's about your account's commenting history. I just put it here because it's your most recent post.)
Trying to hide things in their chat messages and texts and emails was dumb. I still can't believe they did that (one guy even used the exact scenario that we learned at Google: don't say anything in email that would get printed in a negative light on the front page of the NY Times; I had a manager there who actually did have one of his emails, as part of the Oracle Java court case, in a prominent article in the Times). Public employees of the government should assume that literally everything they produce as part of their job (including on personal devices) will eventually be seen externally by people without the necessary context to understand.
From what I can see, Fauci already admitted he made a collection of bad statements and decisions. For me, that's the end of the matter. Suing him over this is just going to damage the country. For example, next time there is a crisis, all those hardworking public servants are going to look at what happened and conclude "no, I will not be the public communicator that helps the country understand the situation we are in and how we are going to get out of it".
This gets really subtle and tricky. This type of thing is closely linked to biological weapons research and we want collaboration and transparency to an extent to maintain access to information.
I'm not sure why "in China" is your point of concern here? Lots of virology research presents minimal danger, and seems fine to me to fund even in geopolitical adversaries (after calculation of the diplomatic and scientific costs and benefits).
My concern with the WIV's work is that they were searching for deadlier and faster-spreading human viruses. So if their research succeeds, then they're deliberately just a containment failure away from a novel human pandemic. China's laxer safety standards compounded that risk, but I'd oppose such work in Baric's lab at UNC too.