One of the most influential U.S. officials during the COVID-19 pandemic is testifying to Congress on June 3, days after one of his former advisers admitted deleting emails.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, 83, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) from 1984 to late 2022, is sitting down in front of the U.S. House of Representatives Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic at 10 a.m. in Washington to answer questions.
Members plan to ask Dr. Fauci about the growing scandal at his former agency, which centers on attempts to evade the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), a law that establishes the right of the public to obtain government information such as emails.
Unearthed missives show Dr. David Morens, the longtime senior adviser to the NIAID director, bragging in multiple emails about learning “how to make emails disappear” after FOIA requests are filed and that his Gmail was “now safe from FOIA.”
In another email obtained by the subcommittee, Dr. Morens wrote, “We are all smart enough to know to never have smoking guns, and if we did we wouldn’t put them in emails and if we found them we’d delete them.”
Dr. Morens also said that Dr. Fauci employed a private email address.
“I can either send stuff to Tony on his private gmail, or hand it to him at work or at his house,“ he wrote on April 21, 2021. ”He is too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble.” He also wrote separately that he had a “secret back channel” to Dr. Fauci.
Under oath, Dr. Morens told the subcommittee that was one of the jokes he made. He also claimed not to recall if he ever sent any messages to Dr. Fauci’s personal email account.
“I don’t remember if I did,” Dr. Morens said. “I may have, but I certainly told him some things that he asked me to tell him about the situation with Peter.”
Many of the emails were sent to Peter Daszak, the head of the EcoHealth Alliance organization, which funneled money from the NIAID to a laboratory in Wuhan, China. Some of the money funded experiments that made a bat coronavirus more dangerous.
President Joe Biden’s administration has suspended funding to the lab, EcoHealth, and Mr. Daszak over their failure to produce records on the experiments.
Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), chairman of the subcommittee, asked Dr. Fauci on May 29 for all documents and communications from his personal email and cellphone related to the lab and related subjects.
Dr. Fauci said in a prepared opening statement that he knew nothing about Dr. Morens deleting emails or assisting Mr. Daszak.
He said that “despite his title, Dr. Morens was not an adviser to me on institute policy or other substantive issues.” Dr. Fauci also said that he’s “never conducted official business via my personal email.”
‘Anders$n’
In other emails obtained by the subcommittee, another top aide to Dr. Fauci used strange letter substitutions.
In one missive about Kristian Andersen, an outside scientist, Dr. Fauci’s aide Greg Folkers wrote “anders$n.” In a missive about EcoHealth, he wrote “Ec~Health.”
“This evasion tactic ensures that when the NIH searches its email server for keywords that are responsive to a FOIA request, Mr. Folkers’s emails that contain the misspelled keyword are not identified or produced as a responsive document,” Mr. Wenstrup said.
Searches in response to FOIA requests are typically based on keywords.
Throughout the pandemic, Dr. Fauci, Dr. Morens, and other top officials in the National Institutes of Health, the parent agency of NIAID, advocated for the theory that COVID-19 came from nature, as opposed to the Wuhan lab.
Mr. Andersen is among the outside scientists who favor the theory. He co-wrote a paper that claimed COVID-19 definitely has a natural origin. The paper was “prompted” by Dr. Fauci, according to one of Mr. Andersen’s emails that was obtained by the subcommittee.
Mr. Andersen and other co-authors received millions of dollars in new funding from NIAID after the paper was published, records show.
Mr. Folkers has not responded to a request for comment.
Dr. Fauci said in his opening statement that accusations that he bribed Mr. Andersen and others with grant money are “preposterous.”
Other Questions
Dr. Fauci will also face questions about the testimony he delivered to the subcommittee behind closed doors in January.
According to a transcript disclosed on May 31, Dr. Fauci said he signed off on thousands of grants without reading any of them.
He also maintained that the Wuhan lab did not perform any gain-of-function experiments, or experiments to enhance a virus, despite two other government officials recently telling the subcommittee the testing did meet the definition of gain-of-function.
Dr. Fauci also said he did not know of any studies to support the 6-foot social distancing measures imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), a member of the subcommittee, noted on social media platform X.
The social distancing “just sort of appeared,” Dr. Fauci said.
Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-N.Y.), another member of the subcommittee, added, “From arbitrary mandates, to suppressing the origins of COVID, to signing off on funds that ended up in a Communist China lab & horrific experiments on innocent animals, we have lots of questions to ask Dr. Fauci on Monday.”
Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), though, signaled that Democrats may still hold the position that criticism of Dr. Fauci amounts to attacks against him.
“House Republicans will spend tomorrow’s hearing attacking science, vaccines, and Dr. Fauci,” he wrote on Sunday. “But those of us on the committee are prepared to push back on their lies. Health, science and truth, matters.”
Will this prove once again to be yet another meaningless hearing on the tax payer’s dime, or will the GOP finally grow a spine ??
EVEN if they do, WHO WILL have the power to ACTUALLY DO anything to him? OH YEA< bidens ran Dept of JUST US!
Fauci was considered the top expert in his field of virus advice,,,,and considereing the chuckeleheads at the CDC I can believe it. So if he was so informed and capable, that can only be proof that it was his corruption in office as the reason he lied about the virus not being created in the Chinese lab, which if found out that he was respnsible for funding illegal lab research in that lab in China which he could not legally do it in the USA, he could not have maintained his federal salary which exceeded that of the President,,,or take Chinese money on the side to keep quiet. This man needs to be financially stripped of every federal dollar he received from the Taxpayers in stolen salary, and fined an equal amount of anything he received financially from China. Jail time is not to be avoided either. This man by all definition of the meaning of the word is a criminal, and proven enemy of THE PEOPLE whom died from his corruption and incompetency by the hundreds of thousands. Ventillators proved to be death sentences which just circulated the disease even more of a virus which proved no more danger than the standard flue if people were left to their own devices to have their bodies cure themselves as nature designed. The 2020 election and 2022 midterms would have resulted in a Conservative win win without the fake mail in ballots perloined from people too frearful of going to the polls.
napolean fauci is guilty 100%
Watched almost an hour of it, and i was SICKENED AT HOw much butt kissing the dems on that panel did.
Regardless of what comes out in this hearing nothing will happen to Fauci. Bureaucrats are exempt from being held accountable because that’s the way Washington wants it. Politicians have an incestuous relationship with the bureaucrats who do their dirty work for them. They will never make it a crime to scr*w the American people because if they did, they would all be in jail.
AND even if the republicans DO REFERR IT, nothing will happen, as BIDEN CONTROLS THE DOJ!