FOIA, lies, and subpoenas
Guest Post by Alex Berenson
A top deputy to Dr. Anthony S. Fauci hid his contacts with Peter Daszak, the conduit for the federal money that went to the Chinese lab that’s Covid’s likely source. Will ANYONE be held accountable?
The bombshells from the Congressional investigation into the lab leak coverup by top federal health bureaucrats just keep coming.
Now Dr. Anthony S. Fauci is squarely in the inquiry’s crosshairs.
Yesterday, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released a 35-page report showing Dr. David Morens, a top advisor to Fauci, went to extraordinary lengths to evade laws on federal record-keeping and transparency.
Morens tried to hide his discussions with Peter Daszak, the British zoologist whose non-profit group had received federal funding for risky coronavirus research at the Chinese lab that is the likely source of Sars-Cov-2.
Over and over, Morens told Daszak and other scientists not to use his federal email account at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which was subject to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests from the public and journalists.
Morens was not shy about his motives, either. In November 2021, he even explained to Dr. Gerald Keusch, a Boston infectious-disease researcher and confidante, that he deliberately sent news articles using his official account. Why? Morens told Keusch that doing so would interfere with FOIA requests by filling his government email with useless and irrelevant documents:
You may have noticed that I have intentionally forwarded you news clips I get daily, sent from my govt email, but that is ok as long as you don’t reply to that email. I have done this because this should not show up in a FOIA [and] is innocuous as it’s just forwarding a third party item already in the public domain…
Please pass this on to Peter [Daszak] and I ask you both NOTHING gets sent to me except to my gmail, and make sure that what gets sent to my gmail doesn’t have a cc to another government employee who could be FOIA’d.
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(The man himself)
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But Morens wasn’t just protecting himself.
He wanted to help Fauci, whom he appears to have revered. Morens made clear Fauci also wanted to evade federal transparency and recordkeeping rules.
In April 2021, he emailed Daszak he would “either send stuff to Tony on his private gmail, or hand it to him at work or at his house” because Fauci “is too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble.”
A month later, he referred to a “‘secret’ back channel” he and others used to communicate with Fauci.
And in July, Morens wrote that:
…today, to my total surprise, my boss Tony actually ASKED me to speak to the National Geographic on the record about origins. I interpret this to mean that our government is lightening up but that Tony doesn’t want his fingerprints on origin stories.
Fauci comes off as a scientific version of Louisiana governor Earl Long, Huey’s lesser-known but equally corrupt brother, who told his henchmen:
Don’t write anything you can phone. Don’t phone anything you can talk. Don’t talk anything you can whisper. Don’t whisper anything you can smile. Don’t smile anything you can nod. Don’t nod anything you can wink.
As the committee wrote in the memo, the emails raise “serious questions of whether Dr. Fauci took part in a conspiracy… to hide official records regarding the origins of COVID-19.”
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(Tony Fauci’s report card: Virology, F. Cover-ups, A.)
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Morens’s efforts to cover his and Fauci’s tracks came as the cover-up around the risky lab work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology – and its links to the NIH through Daszak – was unraveling.
In 2020, Fauci and top virologists had squashed anyone who suggested the coronavirus might have escaped from a Chinese lab. In a National Geographic interview in May 2020, Fauci infamously said he saw:
What Fauci didn’t say was that Daszak and other scientists, with his knowledge, had spent months smearing anyone who suggested the virus might have come out of the Wuhan lab as a conspiracy theorist and racist. In so doing, they delayed potential international investigations, distracted independent journalists, and made finding that evidence nearly impossible.
The evidence that has emerged since 2020 has come instead as the result of dogged work from independent civilian and Congressional investigators.
They’ve shown that in 2018 Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance proposed experiments with the Wuhan lab that appear to have been almost custom-tailored to produce a dangerous coronavirus. And just last month, newly released emails from EcoHealth showed that the lab had many coronaviruses in its freezers with genetic sequences that are unknown, at least to outside scientists.
Could one of those could have been the basic backbone for Sars-Cov-2? Without access to the sequences, no one knows.
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What we do know is that Fauci has until now stayed remarkably clean of either the lab-leak cover-up or the government’s social media censorship efforts.
But Morens was in direct contact with him. And Morens is in trouble. Yesterday’s Congressional report ended with this ominous heading:
Dr. Morens Likely Provided False Testimony To The Congressional Subcommittee
The debates about the origins of Sars-Cov-2 rely on circumstantial evidence and can be hard to follow. Lying is far easier to prove. If Morens is indicted for lying to the committee’s investigators, he will face heavy pressure to flip – to disclose what Fauci knew, and when.
Could the white wall of silence finally be cracking?
